Smart, Sonya decided.
She added it to the inactive website, tested it.
When she broke again, she geared up and took a walk, this time venturing down to the seawall under those clear blue skies.
With the PB&J she’d made—always hit the spot—she sat on the stones and watched a couple of boats glide along. Fishing boats, she thought, doing their cold, hard work.
She nearly dropped the sandwich as, far out, the sea parted and a whale rose up, its massive body spearing toward the sky. Water spewed up, streamed down as it sounded, as he gleamed with it in the strong sun.
When he dived again, the sea rippled and rippled. And stilled.
“I saw a whale. I’m just sitting here eating a PB&J, and I saw a whale.”
Then she cursed herself for not grabbing her phone and getting a picture.
“Next time.”
She slipped a hand into her pocket, closed it around her phone in case it happened again. She waited until she had to admit it was just too cold to sit on a rock wall hoping to see another whale.
She didn’t see the shadow at the window again, and the door didn’t give her any trouble.
“Progress. Settling in.” She studied the portrait as she took off her boots.
“I read about you last night. About you and your Collin, and the crazy bitch who stabbed you. Hester Dobbs. Killed him, too, when you think about it, since he hanged himself, apparently because he couldn’t live without you.”
As she went to hang up her coat, Taylor Swift’s “Lover” played in the library.
“I’m getting used to that.”
She spent the rest of the day on Anna’s project, shifted briefly to start on a mood board for the next client.
And the evening reading a bit more Poole family history.
It seemed Hester Dobbs escaped from her cell shortly before she was to be hanged for Astrid Poole’s murder, only to leap to her death from the seawall at the manor after Collin Poole’s suicide.
Various tools of witchcraft were found in her cabin.
“That’s cheerful.”
She turned to Connor, Collin’s twin, who’d inherited the manor at his brother’s death.
And by all accounts had lived a happy life, from childhood, through his own marriage—with a big ugly murder and suicide in there. He, too, had expanded the manor, and the business, while producing five children.
One of which, she noted, had died on her wedding day.
Just creepy.
Yet he’d died at the age of seventy-two, in his own bed, surrounded by his wife, their surviving children, and his grandchildren.
She decided to end the night’s reading on that happy note.
She then binge-watched three episodes of a new Netflix series and called it a night.
“Situation normal,” she murmured as she slipped into bed, and into sleep.
The clock chiming three didn’t wake her, nor did the creaks of doors, or the drifting music, or a woman’s heartbroken sobs.
PART TWO
The Manor
All houses wherein men have lived and died
are haunted houses.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Haunted Houses”
Chapter Eleven
She rolled through the next few days. Maybe she used tunnel vision more than once, but she rolled through. And with the start-up catering company having signed the contract, she had plenty to roll through.
On a Saturday morning, armed with her phone and a flashlight—just in case—she went through the servants’ passageway. The stairs creaked on the way down, but the light showed the way, so she stuck the flashlight in her back pocket.
She couldn’t imagine herself sitting alone in the media room. Not that it wasn’t nice, she observed as she wandered it. Cozy in its way, with big, comfortable chairs and a huge screen.
He’d even put in a little bar. Maybe he’d stocked it with drinks and snacks.
Had Collin sat there, alone in the big, empty house, going into the worlds on-screen? Had he laughed at comedies, felt his pulse quicken at a thriller?
Had he munched on popcorn and watched old favorites as she often did?
So odd, she thought, to have never known him, and see clearly they’d had things in common. A love and talent for art, a love of stories—books, movies. An appreciation for rambling old houses steeped in history and character.
Would the brothers, if they’d had the chance, have bonded? Would there have been shared holidays? Family jokes?
The longer she lived in the house, the more she thought yes. She’d never know for certain, but she felt yes. They’d have become family, even if they’d met as grown men.