Heroes
Are My Weakness
By: Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Releasing August 26th, 2014
Avon Romance
Blurb
New York Times bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips is back
with a delightful novel filled with her sassy wit and dazzling charm
The dead of winter.
An isolated island off the coast of Maine.
A man.
A woman.
A sinister house looming over the sea ...
He's a reclusive writer whose macabre imagination creates chilling horror novels. She's a down-on-her-luck actress reduced to staging kids' puppet shows. He knows a dozen ways to kill with his bare hands. She knows a dozen ways to kill with laughs.
But she's not laughing now. When she was a teenager, he terrified her. Now they're trapped together on a snowy island off the coast of Maine. Is he the villain she remembers or has he changed? Her head says no. Her heart says yes.
It's going to be a long, hot winter.
An isolated island off the coast of Maine.
A man.
A woman.
A sinister house looming over the sea ...
He's a reclusive writer whose macabre imagination creates chilling horror novels. She's a down-on-her-luck actress reduced to staging kids' puppet shows. He knows a dozen ways to kill with his bare hands. She knows a dozen ways to kill with laughs.
But she's not laughing now. When she was a teenager, he terrified her. Now they're trapped together on a snowy island off the coast of Maine. Is he the villain she remembers or has he changed? Her head says no. Her heart says yes.
It's going to be a long, hot winter.
Link to Follow Tour: http://www.tastybooktours.com/2014/06/now-booking-tasty-virtual-tour-for_17.html
Goodreads Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19367048-heroes-are-my-weakness?from_search=true
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Author
Info
Susan
Elizabeth Phillips soars onto the New York Times bestseller list with every new
publication. She’s the only four-time recipient of the Romance Writers of
America’s prestigious Favorite Book of the Year Award. Susan delights fans by
touching hearts as well as funny bones with her wonderfully whimsical and
modern fairy tales. A resident of the Chicago suburbs, she is also a wife, and
mother of two grown sons.
Author Links
Excerpt (Complete Chapter One)
Excerpt (Chapter 1):
Annie didn’t usually talk to her suitcase, but
she wasn’t exactly herself these days. The high beams of her headlights could
barely penetrate the dark, swirling chaos of the winter blizzard, and the
windshield wipers on her ancient Kia were no match for the wrath of the storm
that had hit the island. “It’s only a little snow,” she told the oversize red
suitcase wedged into the passenger seat. “Just because it feels like the end of
the world doesn’t mean it is.”
You know I hate the
cold, her suitcase replied, in the annoying whine of
a child who preferred making a point by stamping her foot. How could
you bring me to this awful place?
Because Annie had run out of options.
An icy blast rocked the car, and the branches
of the old fir trees hovering over the unpaved road whipped like witches’ hair.
Annie decided that anybody who believed in hell as a fiery furnace had it all
wrong. Hell was this bleak, hostile winter island.
You’ve never heard of
Miami Beach? Crumpet, the spoiled
princess in the suitcase retorted. Instead you had to haul us off to a
deserted island in the middle of the North Atlantic where we’ll probably get
eaten by polar bears!
The gears ground as the Kia struggled up the
narrow, slippery island road. Annie’s head ached, her ribs hurt from coughing,
and the simple act of craning her neck to peer through a clear spot on the
windshield made her dizzy. She was alone in the world with only the imaginary
voices of her ventriloquist dummies anchoring her to reality. As sick as she
was, she didn’t miss the irony.
She conjured up the more calming voice of
Crumpet’s counterpart, the practical Dilly, who was tucked away in the matching
red suitcase in the backseat. We’re not the middle of the Atlantic, sensible
Dilly said. We’re on an island ten miles off the New England coast, and
the last I heard, Maine doesn’t have polar bears. Besides, Peregrine Island
isn’t deserted.
It might as well
be. If Crumpet had been on Annie’s arm, she would have shot her
small nose up in the air. People barely survive here in the middle of
the summer let alone winter. I bet they eat their dead for food.
The car fishtailed ever so slightly. Annie
corrected the skid, gripping the wheel more tightly through her gloves. The
heater barely worked, but she’d begun to perspire under her jacket.
You mustn’t keep
complaining, Crumpet, Dilly admonished her
peevish counterpart. Peregrine Island is a popular summer resort.
It’s not summer! Crumpet countered. It’s the first week of February, we
just drove off a car ferry that made me seasick, and there can’t be more than
fifty people left here. Fifty stupid people!
You know Annie had no
choice but to come here, Dilly said.
Because she’s a big
failure, an unpleasant male voice sneered.
Leo had a bad habit of uttering Annie’s
deepest fears, and it was inevitable that he’d intrude into her thoughts. He
was her least favorite puppet, but every story needed a villain.
Very unkind, Leo, Dilly said. Even if it is true.
The petulant Crumpet continued to
complain. You’re the heroine, Dilly, so everything always turns out
fine for you. But not for the rest of us. Not ever. We’re doomed! Doomed, I
say! We’re forever¾
Annie’s cough cut off the internal histrionics
of her puppet. Sooner or later her body would heal from the lingering
aftereffects of pneumonia¾at least she hoped so¾but what about the rest of her?
She’d lost faith in herself, lost the sense that, at thirty-three, her best days
still lay ahead. She was physically weak, emotionally empty, and more than a
little terrified, hardly the best state for someone forced to spend the next
two months on an isolated Maine island.
That’s only sixty
days, Dilly attempted to point out. Besides,
Annie, you don’t have anywhere else to go.
And there it was. The ugly truth. Annie had
nowhere else to go. Nothing else to do but search for the legacy her mother
might or might not have left her.
The Kia hit a snow-packed rut, and the seat
belt seized up. The pressure on Annie’s chest made her cough again. If only she
could have stayed in the village for the night, but the Island Inn was closed
until May. Not that she could have afforded it anyway.
The car barely crested the hill. She had years
of practice transporting her puppets through every kind of weather to perform
all over the state, but even a decent snow driver had limited control on a road
like this, especially in her Kia. There was a reason the residents of Peregrine
Island drove pickups.
Take it slow, another male voice advised from the suitcase in the back. Slow
and steady wins the race. Peter, her hero puppet¾her knight in shining
armor¾was a voice of encouragement, unlike her former
actor-boyfriend-slash-lover, who’d only encouraged himself.
Annie brought the car to a full stop then
started her slow descent. Halfway down, it happened.
The apparition came from nowhere.
A man clad in black flew across the bottom of
the road on a midnight horse. She’d always had a vivid imagination¾witness her
internal conversations with her puppets¾and she thought she was imagining this.
But the vision was real. Horse and rider racing through the snow, the
man leaning low over the horse’s mane streaming. They were demon
creatures, a nightmare horse and lunatic man galloping into the storm’s fury.
They disappeared as quickly as they’d
appeared, but her foot automatically hit the brake, and the car began to slide.
It skidded across the road and,with a sickening lurch, came to a stop in the
snow-filled ditch.
You’re such a
loser, Leo the villain sneered.
Tears of exhaustion filled her eyes. Her hands
shook. Were the man and horse indeed real or had she conjured them?
She needed to focus. She put the car into reverse and attempted to rock it out,
but the tires only spun deeper. Her head fell against the back of the seat. If
she stayed here long enough, someone would find her. But when? Only the cottage
and the main house lay at the end of this road.
She tried to think. Her single contact on the
island was the man who took care of the main house and the cottage, but she’d
only had an e-mail address to let him know she was arriving and ask him to turn
on the cottage’s utilities. Even if she had his phone number¾Will Shaw¾that was
his name¾she doubted she could get cell reception out here.
Loser. Leo never spoke in an ordinary voice. He only sneered.
Annie grabbed a tissue from a crumpled pack,
but instead of thinking about her dilemma, she thought about the horse and
rider. What kind of a crazy took an animal out in this weather? She squeezed
her eyes shut and fought a wave of nausea. If only she could curl up and go to
sleep. Would it be so terrible to admit that life had gotten the best of her?
Stop it right now, sensible Dilly said.
Annie’s head pounded. She had to find Shaw and
get him to pull out the car.
Never mind Shaw, Peter the hero declared. I’ll do it myself.
Buy Peter¾like her ex-boyfriend¾was only good
in a fictional crisis.
The cottage was about a mile away, an easy
distance for a healthy person in decent weather. But the weather was horrible,
and nothing about her was healthy.
Give up, Leo sneered. You know you want to.
Stop being such a douche,
Leo. This voice came from Scamp, Dilly’s best friend and Annie’s
alter ego. Even though Scamp was responsible for many of the scrapes the
puppets got into¾scrapes heroine Dilly and hero Peter had to sort out¾Annie
loved her courage and big heart.
Pull yourself
together, Scamp ordered. Get out of the car.
Annie wanted to tell her to go to hell, but
what was the point? She pushed her flyaway hair inside the collar of her
quilted jacket and zipped it. Her knit gloves had a hole in the thumb, and the
door handle was icy against her exposed skin. She made herself open it.
The cold slapped her in the face and stole her
breath. She had to force her legs out. Her beat-up brown suede city boots sank
into the snow, and her jeans were no match for the weather. Ducking her head
into the wind, she made her way to the rear of the car to get her heavy coat,
only to see that the trunk was wedged so tightly into the hillside that she
couldn’t open it. Why should she be surprised? Nothing had gone her way in so
long that she’d forgotten what good fortune felt like.
She returned to the driver’s side. Her puppets
should be safe in the car overnight, but what if they weren’t? She needed them.
They were all she had left, and if she lost them, she might disappear
altogether.
Pathetic, Leo sneered.
She wanted to rip him apart.
Babe… You need me more
than I need you, he reminded her. Without
me, you don’t have a show.
She shut him out. Breathing hard, she pulled
the suitcases from the car, retrieved her keys, snapped off the headlights, and
closed the door.
She was immediately plunged into thick,
swirling darkness. Panic clawed at her chest.
I will rescue you! Peter declared.
Annie gripped the suitcase handles tighter,
trying not to let her panic paralyze her.
I can’t see
anything! Crumpet squealed. I hate the dark!
Annie had no handy flashlight app on her
ancient cell phone, but she did have… She set a suitcase in the snow and dug in
her pocket for her car keys and the small LED light attached to the ring. She
hadn’t tried to use the light in months, and she didn’t know if it still
worked. With her heart in her throat, she turned it on.
A sliver of bright blue light cut a tiny path
through the snow, a path so narrow she could easily wander off the road.
Get a grip, Scamp ordered.
Give up, Leo sneered.
Annie took her first steps into the snow. The
wind cut through her thin jacket and tore at her hair, whipping the curly
strands onto her face. Snow slapped the back of her neck, and she
started to cough. Pain compressed her ribs, and the suitcases banged against
her legs. Much too soon, she had to set them down to rest her arms.
She hunched into her jacket collar, trying to
protect her lungs from the icy air. Her fingers burned from the cold, and as
she moved forward again, she called on her puppets’ imaginary voices to keep
her company.
Crumpet: If you drop me and ruin my
sparkly lavender dress, I’ll sue.
Peter: I’m the bravest! The strongest!
I’ll help you.
Leo: (sneering) Do you know how to do
anything right?
Dilly: Don’t listen to Leo. Keep
moving. We’ll get there.
And Scamp, her useless alter ego: A
woman carrying a suitcase walks into a bar…
Icy tears weighed down her eyelashes, blurring
what vision she had. Wind caught the suitcases, threatening to snatch them
away. They were too big, too heavy. Pulling her arms from their sockets. Stupid
to have brought them with her. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But she couldn’t leave
her puppets.
Each step felt like a mile, and she’d never
been so cold. Here she’d thought her luck had begun to change, all because
she’d been able to catch the car ferry over from the mainland. It only ran
sporadically, unlike the converted lobster boat that provided the island with
weekly service. But the farther the ferry traveled from the Maine coastline,
the worse the storm had become.
She trudged on, dragging one foot through the
snow after the other, arms screaming, lungs burning as she tried not to succumb
to another coughing fit. Why hadn’t she put her warm down coat in the car
instead of locking it in the trunk? Why hadn’t she done so many things? Find a
stable occupation. Be more circumspect with her money. Date decent men.
So much time had passed since she’d been
on the island. The road used to stop at the turnoff that led to the cottage and
to Harp House. But what if she missed it? Who knew what might have changed
since then?
She stumbled and fell to her knees. The keys
slipped from her hand and the light went out. She grabbed one of the suitcases
for support. She was frozen. Burning up. She gasped for air and frantically
felt around in the snow. If she lost her light…
Her fingers were so numb she nearly missed it.
When she finally had the flashlight back in her grasp, she turned it on and saw
the stand of trees that had always marked the road’s end. She moved the beam to
the right, where it fell on the big granite boulder at the
turnoff. She hoisted herself back to her feet, lifted the suitcases, and
stumbled through the drifts.
Her temporary relief at having found the
turnoff faded. Centuries of harsh Maine weather had stripped this terrain of
all but the hardiest of spruce, and without a windbreak, the blasts roaring in
from the ocean caught the suitcases like spinnakers. She managed to turn her
back to the wind’s force without losing either one. She sank one foot and then
another, struggling through the tall snowdrifts, dragging the suitcases, and
fighting the urge to lie down and let the cold do what it wanted with her.
She’d bowed so far into the wind that she
nearly missed it. Only as the corner of a suitcase bumped against
a low snow-shrouded stone wall did she realize that she’d
reached Moonraker Cottage.
The small, gray-shingled house was nothing
more than an amorphous shape beneath the snow. No shoveled pathway, no
welcoming lights. The last time she’d been here, the door had been painted
cranberry red, but now it was a cold, periwinkle blue. An unnatural mound of snow
under the front window covered a pair of old wooden lobster traps, a nod to the
house’s origins as a fisherman’s cottage. She hauled herself through the drifts
to the door and set the suitcases down. She fumbled with the key in the lock
only to remember that island people seldom locked up.
The door blew open. She dragged the suitcases
inside and, with the last of her strength, wrestled it shut again. The air
wheezed in her lungs. She collapsed on the closest suitcase, her gasps for
breath more like sobs.
Eventually she grew conscious of the musty
smell of the icy room. Pressing her nose to her sleeve, she fumbled for the
light switch. Nothing happened. Either the caretaker hadn’t gotten her e-mail
asking him to have the generator working and the small furnace fired up or he’d
ignored it. Every frozen part of her throbbed. She dropped her snow-crusted
gloves on the small canvas rug that lay just inside the door but didn’t bother
to shake the snow from the wild tangle of her hair. Her jeans were frozen to her
legs, but she’d have to pull off her boots to remove them, and she was too cold
to do that.
But no matter how miserable she was, she had
to get her puppets out of their snow-caked suitcases. She located one of the
assorted flashlights her mother always kept near the door. Before school and
library budgets were slashed, her puppets had provided a steadier livelihood
than her failed acting career or her part-time jobs walking dogs and serving
drinks at Coffee, Coffee.
Shaking with cold, she cursed the caretaker, who
apparently had no qualms about riding a horse through a storm but couldn’t
summon the effort to do his real job. It had to have been Shaw riding the
horse. No one else lived at this end of the island during the winter. She
unzipped the suitcases and pulled out the five dummies. Leaving them in their
protective plastic bags, she stowed them temporarily on the sofa, then,
flashlight in hand, stumbled across the frigid wood floor.
The interior of Moonraker Cottage bore no
resemblance to anyone’s idea of a traditional New England fishing cottage.
Instead her mother’s eccentric stamp was everywhere¾from a creepy bowl of small
animal skulls to a silver-gilded Louis XIV chest bearing the words pile driver that Mariah had
spray-painted across it in black graffiti. Annie preferred a cozier space, but
during Mariah’s glory days, when she’d inspired fashion designers and a
generation of young artists, both this cottage and her mother’s Manhattan
apartment had been featured in upscale decorating magazines.
Those days had ended years ago when Mariah had
fallen out of favor in Manhattan’s increasingly younger artistic circles.
Wealthy New Yorkers had begun asking others for help compiling their private
art collections, and Mariah had been forced to sell off her valuables to
support her lifestyle. By the time she’d gotten sick, everything was gone.
Everything except something in this cottage¾something that was supposed to be
Annie’s mysterious “legacy.”
“It’s at the cottage.
You’ll have… Plenty of money…” Mariah
had said those words in the final hours before she’d died, a period in which
she’d been barely lucid.
There isn’t any legacy, Leo sneered. Your mother exaggerated everything.
Maybe if Annie had spent more time on the
island she’d know whether Mariah had been telling the truth, but she’d hated it
here and hadn’t been back since her twenty-second birthday, eleven years ago.
She shone the flashlight around her mother’s
bedroom. A life-size mounted photograph of an elaborately carved Italian wooden
headboard served as the actual headboard for the double bed. A pair of wall
hangings made of boiled wool and what looked like remnants from a hardware
store hung next to the closet door. The closet still smelled of her mother’s
signature fragrance, a little-known Japanese men’s cologne that had cost a
fortune to import. As Annie breathed in the scent, she wished she could feel
the grief a daughter should experience following the loss of a parent only five
weeks earlier, but she merely felt depleted.
She waited until she’d located
Mariah’s old scarlet woolen cloak and a pair of heavy socks before
she got rid of her own clothes. After she’d piled every blanket she could
find on her mother’s bed, she climbed under the musty sheets, turned out the
flashlight, and went to sleep.
***
Annie hadn’t thought she’d ever be warm again,
but she was sweating when a coughing fit awakened her sometime around two in
the morning. Her ribs felt as if they’d been crushed, her head pounded, and her
throat was raw. She also had to pee, another setback in a house with no water.
When the coughing finally eased, she struggled out from under the blankets.
Wrapped in the scarlet cloak, she turned on the flashlight and, grabbing the
wall to support herself, made her way to the bathroom.
She kept the flashlight pointed down so she
couldn’t see her reflection in the mirror that hung over the old-fashioned
sink. She knew what she’d see. A long, pale face shadowed by illness; a
sharply pointed chin; big, hazel eyes; and a runaway mane of light brown hair
that kinked and curled wherever it wanted. She had a face children liked, but
that most men found quirky instead of seductive. Her hair and face came from
her unknown father¾“A married man. He wanted nothing to do with you. Dead
now, thank God.” Her shape came from Mariah: tall, thin, with
knobby wrists and elbows, big feet, and long-fingered hands.
“To be a successful
actress, you need to be either exceptionally beautiful or exceptionally
talented,” Mariah had said. “You’re pretty
enough, Antoinette, and you’re a talented mimic, but we have to be realistic…”
Your mother wasn’t
exactly your cheerleader. Dilly stated the obvious.
I’ll be your
cheerleader, Peter proclaimed. I’ll
take care of you and love you forever.
Peter’s heroic proclamations usually made Annie
smile, but tonight she could think only of the emotional chasm between the men
she’d chosen to give her heart to and the fictional heroes she loved. And
the other chasm¾the one between the life she’d imagined for herself and the one
she was living.
Despite Mariah’s objections, Annie had gotten
her degree in theater arts and spent the next ten years plodding to auditions.
She’d done showcases, community theater, and even landed a few character roles
in off-off Broadway plays. Too few. Over the past summer, she’d finally faced
the truth that Mariah was right. Annie was a better ventriloquist than she’d
ever be an actress. Which left her absolutely nowhere.
She found a bottle of ginseng-flavored water
that had somehow escaped freezing. It hurt to swallow even a sip. Taking the
water with her, she made her way back into the living room.
Mariah hadn’t been to the cottage since
summer, just before her cancer diagnosis, but Annie didn’t see a lot of dust.
The caretaker must have done at least part of his job. If only he’d done the
rest.
Her dummies lay on the hot pink Victorian
sofa. The puppets and her car were all she had left.
Not quite all, Dilly said.
Right. There was the staggering load of debt
Annie had no way of repaying, the debt she’d picked up in the last six months
of her mother’s life by trying to satisfy Mariah’s every need.
And finally get Mummy’s
approval, Leo sneered.
She began removing the puppets’ protective
plastic. Each figure was about two and a half feet long, with
moveable eyes and mouth and detachable legs. She picked up Peter and slipped
her hand under his T-shirt.
“How beautiful you are,
my darling Dilly,” he said in his most manly
voice. “The woman of my dreams.”
“And you are the best of
men.” Dilly sighed. “Brave and fearless.”
“Only in Annie’s
imagination,” Scamp said with
uncharacteristic rancor. “Otherwise, you’re as useless as her exes.”
“There are only two exes,
Scamp,” Dilly admonished her friend. “And you
really mustn’t take out your bitterness against men on Peter. I’m sure you
don’t mean to, but you’re starting to sound like a bully, and you know how we
feel about bullies.”
Annie specialized in issue-oriented puppet
shows, several of which focused on bullying. She set Peter down and moved Leo
off by himself, where he whispered his sneer inside her head. You’re
still afraid of me.
Sometimes it felt as if the puppets had minds
of their own.
Pulling the scarlet cloak tighter around her,
she wandered to the front bay window. The storm had eased and
moonlight shone through the panes. She looked out at
the stark winter landscape¾the inky shadows of spruce, the bleak
sheet of marsh. Then she lifted her gaze.
Harp House loomed above her in the distance,
sitting at the very top of a barren cliff. The murky light of a half moon
outlined its angular roofs and dramatic turret. Except for a faint yellow light
visible from a room high in the turret, the house was dark. The scene reminded
her of the covers on the old paperback gothic novels she could still sometimes
find in used bookstores. It didn’t take much imagination for her to envision a
barefoot heroine fleeing that ghostly house in nothing more than a filmy
negligee, the menacing turret light glowing behind her. Those books were quaint
compared to today’s erotically charged vampires, werewolves, and
shape-shifters, but she’d always loved them. They’d nourished her daydreams.
Above the jagged roofline of Harp House, storm
clouds raced across the moon, their journey as wild as the flight of the horse
and rider who’d charged across the road. Her skin turned to gooseflesh, not
from the cold but from her own imagination. She turned away from the window and
glanced over at Leo.
Heavy lidded eyes… Thin-lipped sneer… The
perfect villain. She could have avoided so much pain if she hadn’t romanticized
those brooding men she’d fallen in love with, imagining them as fantasy heroes
instead of realizing one was a cheater and the other a narcissist. Leo,
however, was a different story. She’d created him herself out of cloth and
yarn. She controlled him.
That’s what you
think, he whispered.
She shivered and retreated to the bedroom. But
even as she slipped back under the covers, she couldn’t shake off the dark
vision of the house on the cliff.
Last night I dreamt I
went to Manderley again…
***
She wasn’t hungry when she awakened the next
morning, but she made herself eat a handful of stale granola. The cottage was
frigid, the day gloomy, and all she wanted to do was go back to bed. But she
couldn’t live in the cottage without heat or running water, and the more she
thought about her absent caretaker, the angrier she grew. She dug out the only
phone number she had, one for the island’s combination town hall, post office,
and library, but although her phone was charged, she couldn’t get a signal. She
sank down on the pink velvet couch and dropped her head in her hands. She had
to go after Will Shaw herself, and that meant making the climb to Harp House.
Back to the place she’d sworn she’d never again go near.
She pulled on as many layers of warm clothes
as she could find, then wrapped herself in her mother’s red cloak and knotted
an ancient Hermès scarf under her chin. Summoning all her energy and
willpower, she set out. The day was as gray as her future, the salt air frigid,
and the distance between the cottage and the house at the top of the cliff
insurmountable.
I’ll carry you every step
of the way, Peter announced.
Scamp blew him a raspberry.
It was low tide, but the icy rocks along the
shoreline were too hazardous to walk along at this time of year, so she had to
take the longer route around the saltwater marsh. But it wasn’t just the
distance that filled her with dread.
Dilly tried to give her courage. It’s
been eighteen years since you made the climb to Harp House. The ghosts and
goblins are long gone.
Annie pressed the edge of the cloak over her
nose and mouth.
Don’t worry, Peter said. I’ll watch out for you.
Peter and Dilly were doing their jobs. They
were the ones responsible for untangling Scamp’s scrapes and stepping
in when Leo bullied. They were the ones who delivered antidrug messages,
reminded kids to eat their vegetables, take care of their teeth, and not let
anyone touch their private parts.
But it’ll feel so
good, Leo sneered, then snickered.
Sometimes she wished she’d never created him,
but he was such a perfect villain. He was the bully, the drug pusher, the
junk food king, and the stranger who tried to lure children away from
playgrounds.
Come with me, little
kiddies, and I’ll give you all the candy you want.
Stop it, Annie, Dilly said. No one in the Harp family ever comes to the
island until summer. Only the caretaker lives there.
Leo refused to leave Annie alone. I
have Skittles, M&M’s, Twizzlers…and reminders of all your failures. How’s
that precious acting career working out?
She hunched into her shoulders. She needed to
start meditating or practicing yoga, doing something that would teach her to
discipline her mind instead of letting it wander wherever it wanted¾or didn’t
want¾to go. So what if her acting dreams hadn’t worked out the way she’d
wanted. Kids loved her puppet shows
Her boots crunched in the show. Dead cattails
and hollowed reeds poked their battered heads through the frozen crust of the
sleeping marsh. In summer, the marsh teemed with life, but now all was bleak,
gray, and as quiet as her hopes.
She stopped to rest once again as she neared
the bottom of the freshly plowed gravel drive that led up the cliff to Harp
House. If Shaw could plow, he could get her car out. She dragged herself on.
Before the pneumonia, she could have charged uphill, but by the time she
finally reached the top, her lungs were on fire and she’d started to wheeze.
Far below, the cottage looked like a neglected toy left to fend for itself
against the pounding sea and rugged Maine cliffs. Dragging more fire into her
lungs, she made herself lift her head.
Harp House rose before her, silhouetted
against the pewter sky. Rooted in granite, exposed to summer squalls and winter
gales, it dared the elements to take it down. The island’s other summer homes
had been built on the more protected eastern side of the island, but Harp House
scorned the easy way. Instead it grew from the rocky western headlands far
above the sea, a shingle-sided, forbidding brown wooden fortress with an
unwelcoming turret at one end.
Everything was sharp angles: the peaked roofs,
shadowed eaves, and foreboding gables. How she’d loved this Gothic gloom
when she’d come to live here the summer her mother had married Elliott Harp.
She’d imagined herself clad in a mousy gray dress and clutching a
portmanteau¾gently born, but penniless and desperate, forced to take the humble
position of governess. Chin up and shoulders back, she’d confront the brutish
(but exceptionally handsome) master of the house with so much courage that he
would eventually fall hopelessly in love with her. They’d marry, and then she’d
redecorate.
It hadn’t taken long before the romantic
dreams of a homely fifteen-year-old who read too much and experienced too
little had met a harsher reality.
Now, the swimming pool was an eerie, empty
maw, and the simple sets of wooden stairs that led to the back and
side entrances had been replaced with stone steps guarded by gargoyles.
She passed the stable and followed a roughly
shoveled path to the back door. Shaw had better be here instead of galloping
off on one of Elliott Harp’s horses. She pressed the bell but couldn’t hear it
ring inside. The house was too big. She waited, then rang again, but no one
answered. The doormat looked as though it had been recently used to stamp off
snow. She rapped hard.
The door creaked open.
She was so cold that she stepped into the
mudroom without hesitating. Miscellaneous pieces of outerwear, along with
assorted mops and brooms, hung from a set of hooks. She rounded the corner that
opened into the main kitchen and stopped.
Everything was different. The kitchen no
longer held the walnut cabinets and stainless steel appliances she remembered
from eighteen years ago. Instead the place looked as though it had been
squeezed back through a time warp to the nineteenth century.
The wall between the kitchen and what had once
been a breakfast room was gone, leaving the space twice as large as it had once
been. High, horizontal windows let in light, but since the windows were now set
at least six feet from the floor, only the tallest person could see through
them. Rough plaster covered the top half of the walls, while the bottom was
faced with four-inch-square once-white tiles, some chipped at the corners,
others cracked with age. The floor was old stone, the fireplace a sooty cavern
large enough to roast a wild boar…or a man unwise enough to have been caught
poaching on his master’s land.
Instead of kitchen cabinets, rough shelves
held stoneware bowls and crocks. Tall, freestanding dark wood cupboards rose on
each side of a dull black industrial-size AGA stove. A stone
farmhouse sink held a messy stack of dirty dishes. Copper stockpots and
saucepans¾not shiny and polished, but dented and worn¾hung above a long,
scarred wooden prep table designed to chop off chicken heads, butcher mutton
chops, or whip up a syllabub for his lordship’s dinner.
The kitchen had to be a renovation, but what
kind of renovation regressed two centuries. And why?
Run! Crumpet shrieked. Something’s very wrong here!
Whenever Crumpet got hysterical, Annie counted
on Dilly’s no-nonsense manner to provide perspective, but Dilly remained
silent, and not even Scamp could come up with a wisecrack.
“Mr. Shaw?” Annie’s voice lacked its normal
powers of projection.
When there was no reply, she moved deeper into
the kitchen, leaving wet tracks on the stone floor. But no way was she taking
off her boots. If she had to run, she wasn’t doing it in socks. “Will?”
Not a sound.
She passed the pantry, crossed a narrow back
hallway, detoured around the dining room, and stepped through the arched entry
into the foyer. Only the dimmest gray light penetrated the six square panes
above the front door. The heavy mahogany staircase still led to a landing with
a murky stained-glass window, but the staircase carpet was now a depressing
maroon instead of the multicolored floral from the past. The furniture bore a
dusty film, and a cobweb hung in the corner. The walls had been paneled over in
heavy, dark wood, and the seascape paintings had been replaced with gloomy oil
portraits of prosperous men and women in nineteenth-century dress, none of whom
could possibly have been Elliott Harp’s Irish peasant ancestors. All that was
missing to make the entryway even more depressing was a suit of armor and a
stuffed raven.
She heard footsteps above her and moved closer
to the staircase. “Mr. Shaw? It’s Annie Hewitt. The door was open, so I let
myself in.” She looked up. “I’m going to need¾” The words died on her tongue.
The master of the house stood at the top of
the stairs.
Thank you for hosting today!
ReplyDeleteMy goodness, when the excerpt talked about the dark rider on a dark horse coming out of nowhere in the storm, I was reminded of the many gothic romances I read as a girl. This is going to be a different SEP all right! But I'm game . . . jdh2690@gmail.com
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