Better Homes and Hauntings Read online

  Nina could hear the music in her head, a sedate waltz to give the ladies a chance to show off their carefully practiced skills. She could hear the tinkling of crystal punch cups and murmured conversation. She could feel the warmth of wax tapers and dozens of bodies pressed into the entryway as they waited for the famed Mrs. Whitney to open the first dance. From the corner of her eye, she could see a dark shape hovering at the banister, a feminine shape, from the hips down, a series of tiered, swishing skirts. But the figure had no—

  “Hey, we’re going this way,” Cindy said, making Nina jump.

  “Sorry.” Nina drew a shaky breath and nodded, trying to keep her face impassive. “Just got distracted.”

  “Yeah, dust bunnies the size of tumbleweeds send my OCD tendencies jangling, too. Don’t worry, my crew will get it straightened out,” Cindy said, pulling on Nina’s arm until they entered what was once the music room. The windows stretched from floor to ceiling, letting grime-filtered light tumble over the remains of moldering couches and battered musical instruments. A grand piano stood collapsed in a corner, one leg bent out from under it. Above their heads, the ceiling was pressed tin, with molded plaster cherub faces in the center of every square.

  Nina stared up at the multitude of white babies, frozen with perpetual smiles. “So . . . there’s that.”

  “I spent about a day trying to find an explanation for it,” Cindy said, shaking her head. “And then I realized that would only upset me more. Anthony assured me they’re coming down soon. And then they will be destroyed with fire on holy ground.”

  Nina and Cindy shuddered in tandem. In the meantime, Deacon was pouring himself what looked like an enormous amount of vodka from an improvised wet bar on a defunct harpsichord.

  “Dude!” Jake cried. “It’s eleven o’clock! When I said ‘have a drink,’ I meant soda or an iced tea or something.”

  Nina crossed her arms over the chest of her green Demeter Designs T-shirt. “He had liquor, and he put it in here? Why not in the staff quarters?”

  “Oh, there’s a bar in the staff quarters, too,” Cindy told her. “On the men’s side.”

  “The boys have been holding out on us!” Nina grumbled.

  “Well, I stole their tequila yesterday morning, so I think that makes us even. We’re making margaritas this weekend, lady.”

  Jake took the bottle out of Deacon’s hand when their fearless leader began pouring himself a second shot. “Seriously, man, it’s not that bad! You love Dotty. I love Dotty. I don’t see why you’re upset. It will be just like old times, having her around.”

  “Just like old times?” Deacon scoffed, snagging the vodka bottle out of his friend’s hand. “Oh, you mean like the time Dotty convinced us that the polo ponies at the club were being mistreated, so we should set them all free? I got grounded for two months!”

  “We were eight!” Jake exclaimed.

  “I missed space camp!” Deacon shot back. “Or how about our junior year, when Dotty got it into her head that you and Genevieve Malloy were some sort of star-crossed supercouple, so she set up some John Hughes machination to make sure you ended up together on prom night?”

  “That one wasn’t that bad, actually.” Jake shook his head.

  “Yeah, until Genevieve’s Cro-Magnon gorilla of a boyfriend saw you and tried to kick your ass. I jumped in, like an idiot, to defend you and ended up with fourteen stitches in my scalp. Or how about when we were in college, and Dotty decided I needed a tattoo, got me drunk, and took me to ‘her’ tattoo guy?”

  “OK, OK, I get the point,” Jake said, snagging the bottle out of Deacon’s hands.

  “Misspelled!” Deacon exclaimed, gesturing at his shoulder blade. “In two places!”

  “In her defense, it’s binary code, so no one knows that it’s misspelled. And technically, it’s not misspelled; some of the numbers are just out of order. So it’s misnumbered.”

  “I know it’s misnumbered!” Deacon groused. “It’s not that I don’t love my cousin. You know that I do. It’s just that she sows destruction and chaos wherever she goes. She’s like a chipper, chirpy goddess Kali.”

  “Try saying that three times fast,” Jake muttered.

  “Deacon, what is your problem with me being here?” Dotty demanded from the doorway, hands on hips. She’d removed the colorful scarves, revealing a wild shoulder-length mane of dark chestnut hair streaked with purple and red. The eyes that had been hidden by oversized sunglasses were so blue they were practically Liz Taylor violet. She looked like a delicate, whimsical—and at the moment, very pissed-off—creature from the Irish fairy tales that Nina’s nana used to tell her. All puckish good humor until you crossed her, and then she salted your farmland and turned your milk cows sour.

  Jake stood behind Dotty, arms crossed and leaning against the doorframe, surveying the scene with a shell-shocked expression as Dotty stood toe-to-toe with her cousin and poked him in the chest.

  “You know how seriously I’m taking this book project. You know how important it is to me to finish it before you toss our family history into the Dumpster.”

  “First, that family-history crack was uncalled for,” Deacon told her, poking his finger at her forehead. He did it without much force, but it seemed to annoy Dotty thoroughly. “And second, pardon me if I don’t take your commitment to this project very seriously. Oh, I know, it’s very important to you. Just like it was very important to you to spend eight months documenting the deterioration of cave paintings in Australia, which became less important when you decided to do a coffee-table book on the annual migration of red crabs across Christmas Island, which became less important when you decided to do a book on modern-day prospectors in Alaska. And then you decided to take off to Mexico to do sunrise studies of ancient Mayan ruins, which somehow ended up becoming a two-month-long trip down to Brazil because you met a guy who owned an emerald mine. Look, I love you, but writing this book you’ve planned is going to be another thing that turns out to be less important than whatever comes up next. And in the meantime, you’re distracting my staff, interfering with my progress, and generally being a pain in my ass. And frankly, I’m getting a little tired of being the guy who cleans up your messes, bails you out of jail, or ends up with a misspelled tattoo!”

  “He bailed you out of jail?” Nina asked, frowning.

  “It was just a little protest on my college campus,” Dotty assured her. “No big deal. The campus security guards had no sense of humor.”

  “She was naked,” Deacon told Nina.

  “I was a little naked,” Dotty admitted. “But it was for a good cause.”

  “You were protesting the use of hormone-injected chicken in the campus cafeteria. How did that cause require you to be naked?” Jake asked, giving in to the need for a large drink.

  “I think we’re going to like her,” Cindy told Nina.

  Nina raised her hand. “I have a question. You’re going to write a book about the house?”

  Dotty beamed at Nina and practically skipped across the music room to throw her arms around her. She gave her a tight hug and then moved on to give Cindy similar treatment. Jake immediately poured Nina and Cindy their own drinks. “Yes! Well, it’s not so much a book about the house as it is about our family. I’m a writer and photographer—”

  This declaration was met by weary groans from Jake and Deacon.

  Dotty glared at both of them. “Shut it, you two.”

  Shooing Jake away from the bar, Cindy poured Dotty a large drink of her own.

  Dotty continued, “I’m a writer and a photographer, an art form I happen to take very seriously. I plan on documenting the entire renovation process, showing the house in its present decayed state and then whatever Deacon decides to do with it. I want to publish the pictures in a book explaining the house’s history and how its construction affected our family.”

  “Air out our family laundry, you mean?” Deacon flopped into a nearby wingback chair, which buckled even under his slight weight.

>   “Deacon, it’s been a hundred years. Trust me, that laundry’s flapped in the breeze for quite a while. If anything, a book like this might clear up some of the more salacious rumors. And once I get my hands on Great-great-grandmother Catherine’s diary—”

  “Which has never been found,” Deacon interjected.

  Dotty glared at him. “And sorted through the family photos and documents—”

  “Which have been ransacked and scattered all over the house by our dear relatives.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be able to put together a more accurate picture of Catherine and Gerald,” Dotty finished huffily. “And I’m sure I’ll be able to explain the Whitney curse and why you seem to have been able to break it.”

  “There’s no Whitney curse!” Deacon scowled.

  “Oh, and there are no ghosts roaming the halls of the Crane’s Nest, right?” Dotty shot back. “Despite the fact that almost every person who has visited this house in the last hundred years has had some sort of unsettling experience here. And I’m sorry, but what do you call it when—with the exception of you—no Whitneys have been able to make anything of themselves since Gerald Whitney? Any time a Whitney descendant starts a business venture or marries into a prominent family, that venture or that family is bankrupt within a year. The Whitney curse. Pretty soon, not even the pedigree was enough to tempt rich suitors or investors. The only thing the family has left is the island, this house, and what’s left of its contents. And the only reason the family was able to hold on to it was that it was a land trust from the governor. Deacon here somehow broke the chain. I’m hoping that researching the book will help me figure out why.”

  Deacon drained his glass. “You are aware that there have already been three books published about Catherine and Gerald.”

  Dotty huffed out an irritated breath. A series of nasty pulp tell-all paperbacks had “reimagined” their great-great-grandmother’s bitter end every twenty years or so. The first, in the 1940s, was the least offensive, postulating that Gerald had killed Catherine in a fit of jealous rage over her star-crossed love affair with Jack Donovan, the architect of the Crane’s Nest and a former childhood friend of Mrs. Whitney’s, and then used the fire in the south wing to distract the staff long enough to dump her body offshore. In the early 1960s, another book insisted that mounting debts and the sheer, overwhelming expense of building the house had sent Gerald into a resentful, murderous tailspin. Hollywood attempted to adapt that version into a thinly veiled feature film, which was slated to star Marilyn Monroe until her death shut down production. And in the late 1970s, the last, most vicious author to rewrite Whitney history accused Gerald of murdering Catherine in an opium-fueled rage after he found her in flagrante with her lady’s maid.

  For the first time since her arrival, Dotty frowned, muttering into her tumbler of vodka. “Yeah, and personally, I find it depressing, not just that the slander was so thorough but that investigators refused to deviate from the idea that Gerald killed his wife. No other suspect would do. It’s closed-minded, which isn’t tolerable. But it’s also unimaginative, which is downright unforgivable. And none of those books was written with a family perspective. Face it, Deacon, I have just as much right to be here as you do. I don’t resent you getting the house. Your dad was the oldest, and it was right that it passed to him, then you. But you know that you don’t have it in that logical, mathematical heart of yours to shut me out. You need me here. Jake and I keep you human.”

  “You and Jake keep my insurance adjusters busy.” Deacon snorted.

  Jake made an indignant sound. “That’s not—Wait, OK, that’s fair.”

  “Fourth of July party?” Dotty guessed, giggling as Jake nodded. Realizing that Deacon was glaring at her, she stifled it, pulling a more penitent face. She may or may not have pouted her lips the slightest bit. When Deacon failed to respond, she made the pout more pronounced. Deacon grimaced. She ratcheted up the pout even more. Deacon groaned. For the others, it was like watching a ping-pong match consisting solely of facial expressions.

  “The first time you mess up the construction schedule, you’re out of here,” Deacon warned her.

  “You won’t even know I’m here.” Dotty giggled, hopping into Deacon’s lap and giving him a world-class noogie. Deacon’s eyes rolled toward the creepy cherubs, who remained unhelpful and silent on the subject of his cousin.

  NINA WASN’T SURE what to make of Dotty Whitney. This was a woman who clearly had old blue blood flowing through her veins. She carried herself with that innate grace and assurance that old-money girls seemed to learn in their first days at prep school. Even the bohemian mishmash of tights, clashing scarves, and a loose man’s shirt looked magazine-shoot-ready for some feature titled “Yard Sale Chic.” But instead of turning her nose up at the accommodations in the staff quarters, she’d immediately starting adjusting the feng shui of her dorm bedroom.

  “I could do yours, too,” she offered, shoving her iron bedframe diagonally from the door in what she called the “commanding position” for energy restoration and calm.

  “I’m good,” Cindy said. “Nina?”

  Nina was staring through the window at the main house. While a part of her still dreaded the idea of going inside, some peculiar, compulsive part of her brain was urging her back toward the house, to find out whether the smoky figure she’d seen was real or the imaginings of a brain pushed a little too far. There were so many things she hadn’t seen in the house, so many rooms to explore. She could just walk across the lawn anytime she wanted and walk in. Why had she waited so long? She could go right now, if she wanted to, so why didn’t she—

  “Nina?” Cindy touched her arm. “You OK?”

  “Oh, no.” Nina put her hands up in a warding-off gesture. “Uh, I was just feng shuied last week.”

  Cindy noticed a well-crafted leather journal open on Dotty’s bed. On the page there was a photo of the Eiffel Tower, shot at some distance, and another of a slim pair of feet clad in ballet flats on a cobblestone street. She crept a little closer and flipped to the next page, and the next. The book contained an extensive collection of black-and-white and color shots. A field of wheat with cypress trees spiking up from the golden waves. Black-and-white stills of the streets of Paris, a child eating an apple with an open-air market in the background.

  “That is my portfolio,” Dotty said. “I have some basic skill with a camera. So I’ve taken an obnoxious number of pictures while I have traveled. But I’m no Galen Rowell.”

  “You said something about a book?” Cindy asked.

  “I want to document the whole renovation process, and everybody involved, so release forms are coming your way, thank you very much. And I’ll be going through the trunks and documents in the attic, looking for information about my great-great-grandparents and their marriage. I want to write about how the events of the past have affected our family over the years, how they’re still affecting us, and how Deacon is trying to go about changing that. He’ll hate every minute of being interviewed, but he’ll get over it.”

  “Do you really want to dig up all that family dirt—” Nina cleared her throat. “I mean, history?”

  Dotty threw a scarf decorated with multicolored skulls over the lamp on her nightstand. “Sometimes the dirt needs to be dug up.”

  Cindy’s plump pink lips quirked. “Well, I can help you with the relics. I’ve already saved a few documents from an old desk of Gerald’s that you might be interested in.”

  Dotty opened her shoulder bag and rummaged, muttering. “I have a whole list of items I’m looking for—diaries, housekeeping ledgers, visitor books, anything from the architect Jack Donovan’s office on the property. If he kept a journal about the building process, that would be even better.”

  Cindy nodded. She’d seen plenty of old books around the house, some of them with handwritten pages. And as long as it was OK with Mr. Whitney, she didn’t mind handing them over to another “on-site” Whitney for inspection before they were catalogued.
r />   “I know that the house has been picked over pretty thoroughly over the years, so you can’t promise much. Would you believe our parents had to actually chase some historical-society ladies off the island once because Deacon’s dad caught them trying to ‘claim’ documents for their collections of artifacts? Of course, Deacon’s dad wasn’t supposed to be out here looking for valuables, either, but that’s neither here nor there. Dang it!”

  When she couldn’t find what she wanted, she sighed, dug into her jeans pocket, and fished out what looked like a Starbucks napkin. She smiled triumphantly and handed her “list” over to Cindy. “And while you’re at it, I need you to keep an eye out for these . . .” Dotty plopped onto her bed, kicking off her shoes and digging into her army duffel to pull out a sketchbook that she handed to Nina. Nina was beginning to wonder if it was like Mary Poppins’s bottomless bag, with an endless supply of gypsy travel supplies.

  She flipped through the sketchbook until she found several pages on which Dotty had fixed frayed, yellowed sketches of elaborate pieces of jewelry. A chunky bracelet made from diamond daisies. A choker consisting of two ropes of pearls holding in place a large citrine in a sunburst setting. A golden peacock brooch with emeralds and sapphires set in the tail. A multipaneled Bohemian-style garnet necklace.

  “This is Catherine Whitney’s fabled jewelry collection. Gerald may have been stingy with his affections, but he was a pioneer of the theory that diamonds make up for everything. Men of a certain class liked their peers to know they could afford to keep their wives and mistresses swimming in jewels. After search parties found her body and the maids were packing up her belongings, they realized the collection was missing. Catherine’s wedding-ring set was also missing from her hand when they found her, which just reinforced the notion that she’d left her husband. Like she’d ripped them off and thrown them at him in a final ‘eff you.’ ”