Элизабет Чандлер: Legacy of Lies

As it turned out, sitting inside a cozy circle of lamplight on the high four-poster bed, with the dense night falling around Grandmother’s house, was the perfect way to read a gothic romance. When I heard Grandmother come up, I changed into my nightgown but kept turning pages. The face of the deranged housekeeper started to look like Nancy’s and the warm-hearted cook spoke with Ginny’s voice. The story melted into the events of the day and my eyes closed.

Two hours later I sat straight up, knocking my book off the bed.

I had been dreaming about the house again, playing in the same cozy room with the sloped ceiling and dormer windows. But my old dream had become so clear, so real, I could hardly believe I was awake in a different room. In the dream I had a new toy: a doll-house that was a miniature of Grandmother’s house.

I threw back the quilt and slid off the edge of the bed. The night was brighter than when I’d fallen asleep, the air colder.

I pulled a sweatshirt on over my nightgown, then stood at the window that looked down on the herb garden. The late-rising moon silvered the roofs of the back wing, both the shiny tin over the kitchen porch and the duller wood shingles that peaked above each second-floor window. Dormer windows and a sloped roof! Was my playroom in the back wing?

Was it real?

I snatched up my purse and dug for my key chain. It had a penlight anchoring it which, with the moonlight, was bright enough to show my way. I eased open the bedroom door.

The hall was lit dimly by a lamp on a side table. All the doors were shut, just as they had been earlier in the day.

I glanced back at my alarm clock: 11:59. I doubted Matt would be home before curfew. I slipped down the wide stairway, hurrying past the grandfather clock. In the shadows it seemed like another person, standing stiff and tall on the landing, watching me with disapproval. Just as I reached the bottom of the steps, it began its long toll of twelve.

A lit wall sconce in the lower hall guided me through the door that led into the back hall. I passed the service entrances to the dining room and library and tiptoed down the steps to the rear wing. I walked through the kitchen and opened a door next to the big hearth, then followed a hall that ended at a corner stair.

As I reached the stair, the sound of an engine caught my attention. Matt was being dropped off. I quickly climbed the narrow, triangular steps.

The room at the top had a low, sloping roof, peaked in the middle, with dormer windows on each side, just as in my dream. But it was empty. I played my penlight over the walls.

Its beam flashed off a bright object, a knob. I outlined the rectangle of a built-in cupboard, then walked over and opened it.

Something ran across my feet. I jammed my hand in my mouth to keep from screaming, and then to silence my laughter-nervous laughter. The mouse was probably just as rattled. I shone the penlight inside the cupboard and my grip tightened. There it was, the dollhouse, a smaller version of Scarborough House, accurate down to the dormer windows in the back wing where I was standing.

I slid the house out of the cupboard and into a pool of moonlight, then knelt before it. There were large hinges on the corners which allowed the entire front to be opened as one panel. I gently pulled it back. Inside was miniature furniture, replicas of that in the real house.

I sat back on my heels, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for dreaming about something Td never seen, then seeing it for real. As a little kid, I used to pretend I was going inside the pictures of my books. I’d imagine fairy-tale castles in three dimensions and daydream about living inside them. Among the photos Uncle Paul had sent Mom, I remembered a picture of her Barbie doll. It was possible that the doll-house was in those photos and that I had imagined going inside it, until it became a house in my dreams.

As for the similarity between this room and my dream room, there were many ways to account for that. The lodge where my family vacationed in Flagstaff had a sloping roof and dormer windows, and I’d always liked the place. It figured that I’d turn it into a playroom inside my dream house.

I closed the front of the dollhouse and slid it back inside the cupboard. When I stood up, I noticed a door that might lead back to my room by an upstairs route, but played it safe and left the way I had come. At the bottom of the narrow stairs I clicked off my penlight and walked noiselessly toward the kitchen. After making sure that Matt wasn’t having a late-night snack, I tiptoed through the kitchen and up the steps connecting the wing to the main house. In the back hall I stopped abruptly.

Matt was in the library, sitting at Grandmother’s desk, his back to me. He was leaning over a drawer, searching it, opening files and boxes, sifting through contents that I couldn’t see. What was he up to?

For a moment I thought of bursting in and asking him, but then I’d have some explaining to do as well. I slipped down the hall and padded upstairs to my room.

Saturday morning Matt and I arrived downstairs at the same time, close to ten o’clock. Grandmother greeted me first.

“You’ve wasted a fine morning.”

And good morning to you, too, I thought. But it was a new day and I was determined to make it start out well. “I wish I’d gotten up earlier,” I said. “I guess I’m still on Arizona time.”

She turned to my cousin. “I don’t like being left with the chores, Matt.”

“What chores, Grandmother?” he asked, then leaned down from the waist in a runner’s stretch.

He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, which showed off the muscled body of a guy who worked out often. Stop looking, Megan, I told myself.

“You live here,” Grandmother answered him sharply. “You know what has to be done.”

“Yes,” he replied, his voice patient, “but what exactly did you need done?”

“My car has to be washed.”

“I did it Thursday afternoon, remember?”

“The house gutters must be cleaned.”

“I’ve done most of that. I’ll finish up after the football game this afternoon.”

“There is raking.”

“It would make more sense in another week.”

“Is there something I can do?” I asked.

Matt gave me a cool look. I mirrored it, then saw the spark in Grandmother’s eye. She enjoyed the fact that we didn’t get along.

“I can handle things,” he told me.

What was his problem? Did he think I was competing for brownie points? He seemed too sure of himself to worry about being anything less than “number one” with her. And even if some of that confidence was an act, he knew how Grandmother felt about adopted children.

As irritated as I was with Matt, I was even more annoyed with myself for continuing to give him chances to be rude.

But something defiant in me, something that refused to believe this was the genuine Matt, kept trying.

“Are you going for a run?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Can I go with you?”

He picked up a plastic bottle from the kitchen counter and twisted off the top. “No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m doing serious running.”

I prickled. “Meaning you don’t think I can keep up with you?”

“Maybe you can,” he said with a shrug, then took a vitamin.

“Then why not? In twenty-five words or more,” I added, tired of his short answers.

He gazed at me with dark brown eyes. “I work hard yearround to keep in shape for lacrosse. I run crosscountry, not little loops around a track.”

“At home my dad and I do trails through the Catalinas,” I told him. “They’re low mountains, but next to the Eastern Shore, they look like the Rockies.”