Kate thought about this. “Do you think I’m just pushing my feelings away? Should I be feeling more? I mean, am I going to have a hard fall after all of this denial?”
“You’re not denying anything.” Simon looked her square in the eyes. “You’re not thinking that maybe you were mistaken about the affair, right?”
“Right,” Kate said. “I know what I saw.”
“And you’re not thinking of sweeping it under the rug? Marriages do survive affairs.”
“Not a chance. My trust in him is completely eroded. There’s nothing left.”
“Okay, then,” Simon said. “You’re just fine. Don’t obsess about him or your marriage. Use this mystery—and this house for that matter—as a wonderful diversion. Think about Kevin when you’re ready to think about Kevin. Until then, let’s have fun with this.” He opened his arms wide, gesturing toward the dusty trunks.
Kate smiled at her cousin but said nothing, tears welling up in her eyes.
“I can’t fathom why Kevin would cheat on someone as wonderful as you,” Simon went on. “But I can certainly fathom why you should kick his ass out of your life. When you’re ready to do that, divorce his ass, sell your house in town, and make a new life here; just know that all of this is waiting for you. And if you decide that you don’t want to do what I’ve proposed, that instead you want to go back to Kevin and work through this to save your marriage—well, honey, I’ll be standing right behind you then, too. Bring him here and we’ll all toast your reunion. And I promise not to put any arsenic in his glass.”
“This is such a soft place for me to fall,” Kate said, the tears stinging her eyes. “Do you know how wonderful you are?”
“Of course I do,” Simon laughed. “I’ve been singing my own praises for years.”
He enveloped her in a hug again, the two of them standing together like that for a long while. “Now, are you ready to get to work?” he asked.
Kate shook the tears from her eyes and pointed to the two doors near the fireplace. “Where do those doors lead?”
“Oh, that’s the best yet.” Simon started toward one of the doors. “You know the turrets on either side of the house?”
“These doors lead to the turrets?”
“Winding staircases and the whole nine yards.” Simon opened the door closest to him. “Have a look. This is really something special.”
Kate followed Simon through the doorway and up a dusty, winding staircase, which opened up into a round room with windows on all sides. Even through the decades of dust, the view was magnificent.
“They weren’t used as bedrooms in Harry’s day,” Simon said. “Grandma used to play up here when she was little. Do you remember her saying that?”
“I do,” Kate said.
“I’m thinking we’ll make them into luxury suites for people who host events in the ballroom. We’ll have to add bathrooms and other amenities, of course.”
If only Kate and Simon had listened a bit more carefully, they might have heard the cries, or certainly felt the anguish that still lingered here, left by a man nearly a century before. A man whose actions, kept secret all these years, had caused him to take refuge in that room and weep bitter tears of regret and disbelief where no one could hear him. It was the sound a soul made when it was in the very depths of mourning, and it never dissipated, even in death.
But they weren’t listening closely enough to discern it. They were immersed in the present.
“The first step,” Simon was saying as they trotted down the turret stairs to the ballroom, “is going through the trunks to see what’s here, what we can use, and what we should just pack away into the attic.”
“Let’s get started then,” Kate said, pulling a sheet off an old, wooden trunk with a brass clasp. “Is this thing locked?” she wondered aloud, but a bit of fidgeting with the lock answered her question. It popped open with a little effort.
Under a burgundy-colored blanket, Kate saw that the trunk was stuffed full of scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, aging photographs, and memorabilia of a life gone by. She sank down on the floor next to the trunk and peered inside.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Kate wondered. If all the trunks were this full of items, they’d be there sifting through them for a good, long while.
“I’m thinking about family photos and other memorabilia from Harrison and Celeste’s time,” Simon said. “We’re renovating this house back to its original glory, if you will, so I thought that accenting it with items from that period would give guests a real sense of the past.”
“I see,” Kate said, fingering the items in her trunk. “You want to duplicate the feel of the main floor throughout the house.”
“Exactly,” Simon said. “We’ve got some photos and other things, old books and such, on the second floor, but I want more of them for the guest rooms and to adorn the walls of this ballroom. What I’d really love are photos from galas and balls that Harrison and Celeste hosted here, but I don’t suppose we’ll get that lucky.”
“Who knows?” Kate said. “All we can do is look and see what’s here.”
“I can see right away that this trunk isn’t going to have what we need,” Simon said, gesturing to the trunk in front of him. “Look at this.” He pulled out an old toy, a child’s telephone. “This looks like it was made in the forties. These are probably our dads’ toys. I’ll bet everything in here is from that period.”
“My trunk looks more promising,” Kate said. Simon walked across the room and came to sit on the other side of it. The two sifted through the belongings of their ancestors, taking hold of items with enormous sentimental value to Celeste and Harrison but which meant little to these two cousins today. Among the relics, they found a baby’s baptism gown, a delicate crocheted blanket, a tiny silver cup.
Kate held them up and examined them, murmuring comments like, “Oh, how beautiful,” and “I wonder who wore this?” not knowing that Celeste had carefully laid these items away with a crippling grief and longing in her heart.
“Harrison!” Celeste’s screams had echoed through the enormous, empty house in the middle of a windy autumn night. “She’s not breathing! Clementine is not breathing!”
His wife’s cries awoke the new father, who rushed, horrified, to the side of his first daughter’s crib in the nursery, an alcove just off what was now the master bedroom that Simon and Jonathan had renovated into a spectacular master bath, complete with a steam shower and Jacuzzi tub. It was Simon’s favorite thing, lazing in the scented water, enjoying a glass of wine and a good book. He had no idea that his great-grandmother had begun to lose her sanity in the exact spot where numerous water jets now massaged the kinks in his back. Although he had told Kate that he had never heard messages from the other side, if he had listened keenly enough during any one of his baths, he would have heard the soft weeping of a woman cradling her dead child, her first child. Clementine.
Harrison had burst into the room to find a horrific scene. Celeste realized her beloved infant was dead—surely, she must’ve realized it—but Harrison could not convince her to let go of the tiny body. She sat in the nursery’s rocking chair, singing and cooing to the dead child in her arms. “Why won’t she go to sleep? Why won’t she stop crying?”