5. Evan

5

Evan

I mages of people dancing in nineteen twenties clothes infiltrated my dreams all night. I knew they were from the twenties because my grandmother had harbored a not-so-secret crush on actor Leonardo DiCaprio and forced Dad and me to watch The Great Gatsby way too many times.

The dreams were mostly surreal. But my attention kept being drawn back to one man over and over. In fact, his was the only face I could make out. He had sharp angular features and wore his dark brown hair slicked back.

He was attractive, in a harsh way—not my type. Had he been wearing modern clothes, he’d probably look less severe.

I could feel a pull. Like he was a magnet, and I was drawn to him. When I woke the next morning, my head was still pounding, and the memory of the dream wasn’t helping things much.

I found the painkillers the hospital had sent home with me and downed one as prescribed. After the pounding stopped, I called the attorney.

Mr. James was apologetic, saying he was sorry he hadn’t been there to pick me up. When he asked about what I thought of the manor, I lied and told him I slipped and fell on the steps, and that was why I’d ended up at the hospital, then the hotel. I knew something had hit me, though, something my battered brain was now remembering as a misty presence.

I laughed at how our brains could make shit up. I guessed I liked the haunted house shows a bit too much and this was the meaning for the new interpretation. In reality, I was probably hit by something hanging in the doorway that had come loose when I tried to enter. The place was my home now, so there was no need to get others involved in what could end up being a future insurance claim.

I’d need to go see what had hit me and, possibly, get it fixed while I tried to figure out what to do with the massive estate I’d inherited. Despite the concussion, I’d already decided the manor wasn’t for me. Not really. I was a simple man who loved simple things. There was no real room in my life for that kind of property.

Still, I wanted to walk through it, get a feel for it and hopefully, understand what’d happened all those years ago. The mystery was alluring, as well as frustrating. The place represented all the bad that’d happened to my family over the past century, but now it also represented my future.

When Mr. James pulled up at the hotel, he greeted me with a smile. He was middle-aged, I assumed about fifty. Unlike the man who’d picked me up yesterday, Mr. James never stopped talking from the moment I met him, not even when he pulled into the manor’s driveway.

My head was pounding again when we reached the estate, and I was counting the seconds until I was once again left alone without the attorney’s chatter.

As we passed the cute cottage next to the lake and swans, I asked who owned it.

“Why, you do, of course, but Mr. Beacroft occupies it. The man you met yesterday. Mr. Beacroft is the caretaker of the estate. He still works for Hallock Hotels, even though their lease on the manor has run out. They’ve got an agreement with the state that he continue overseeing the place until the new owner arrives, and here you are.”

“Oh,” I said, refocusing on the question I’d wanted to ask him, but had forgotten with all his chatter and the accompanying headache. “What was the lease agreement between Hallock and the state? I might be interested in renewing it.”

Mr. James laughed. “Unlikely, the hotel chain had a fifty-year contract with the state. If you want my opinion, that’s why they so readily agreed to give the estate back to you. Hallock had taken on the hotel’s renovations in exchange for a yearly lease of one dollar.”

“Oh, well, no then. I already know I’m not interested in running a place like this. Not on my own.”

“I anticipated that, son,” he said, and smiled. This time there was no small amount of greed showing through. “I can present you with your options. My office is already preparing those for you, but why don’t you spend some time on the property, get to know it, and we’ll discuss them next week.”

“Next week?” I asked, perplexed as to why he would put me off.

“Yes, unfortunately, I have a case that’s gone sideways, and I’m going to have to drop you here, then rush back to Salem. I doubt I’ll be back in the area until the middle of next week at the soonest.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, okay, that should be fine.”

I reached up and rubbed my temples. The headache was beginning to get fierce. I pulled my meds out again and read that I had to wait four hours between doses, which meant I had another two hours. Dammit , I thought to myself.

Mr. James led me up the stairs and went in ahead of me. Nothing obvious swung through the doorway. I inconspicuously touched the door handle as I walked by, but there was no numbing feeling. There was no obvious explanation for why I’d been hit last night or what had hit me.

As I walked into the grand entryway, I gasped in surprise. It was truly magnificent. A central staircase led up from the middle of the room, flanked by two intensely beautiful and elaborate chandeliers. To the right, there was what must’ve been the hotel’s reception desk, and behind that was a room I assumed used to be a dining room.

To my left, another room shone brightly in the sun. It was filled with antique-looking furniture and must’ve been used as a sitting room for guests.

There was a retro feel to the place. Now that I knew Hallock had leased it since the nineteen seventies, I was sure the period renovation of the old place had occurred around that time, although I saw no gold, brown, or olive-green pieces like most furniture from that period.

“Well, son, I hate to leave you again so soon, but make yourself at home. You have Mr. Beacroft’s number if you need him.”

“No, he didn’t give it to me,” I said, distracted as I took in the grandeur of the place.

“No? How strange. Well,” he said, and shuffled through his suit jacket, coming up with a card and a pen. “This is his number.” He wrote it on the back of his card and handed it to me. “You give him a call and let him tell you all you need to know about the place. It’s not like he isn’t the expert anyway. He’s the last of the hotel staff still on the premises and knows the ins and outs of this place like the back of his hand. As I mentioned, keeping him on as caretaker during this transition was part of the agreement between Hallock and the state.”

Mr. James was just chatting idly, but it was valuable information. Looking closer, I could see a lot of deferred maintenance. The drapery was more than a little tattered. The rugs that must’ve been opulent when they’d first been put down were faded and worn.

Even the reception desk was scuffed, and I had a sudden urge to paint it to hide its shabbiness. “Well, I’m off then, don’t hesitate to contact my office if you have any questions,” Mr. James said, blessedly disappearing.

I put my luggage to the side of the front door, closed it, and locked it. I didn’t know who’d hit me last night, but now that I was inside the building, I had to assume it was someone, not something. The place was way too big to have all the locks changed, at least on my limited budget, but at least locking the front door made me feel better.

I started my tour in the giant sitting room to my left. The room was spectacular, and I had to assume at one time it must’ve been a formal ballroom since matching chandeliers to the ones in the entryway decorated the art deco ceiling.

Deferred maintenance continued in this room as well. The seating, which at one time must’ve been impressive, was worn, and some had visible holes in the upholstery. Ignoring all that, I walked through the back doors onto an enormous patio that stunned me more than anything I’d seen so far inside. The manor sat atop a hill overlooking the winding river we’d driven along as we approached the estate. In the distance, I could even see the Pacific with its wild waves crashing upon the shore. The view was something out of a fairy tale.

I would’ve spent more time staring at the view, except the wind made it bitterly cold that high up, and I’d only just begun my tour. I went back inside, but this time, I didn’t worry about locking up. I would never get all the doors locked. If someone wanted to come in, there wasn’t much I could do anyway.

The dining room was beautiful and as dated as the rest. The kitchens, however, were newer. Clearly, Hallock had invested more money into that area than the rest. Maybe they were going to forgo the hotel and just keep the restaurant?

Not a bad idea , I thought. Running a hotel was like speaking French for me. I hadn’t a clue how to do it. But I’d spent most of my adult life serving and waiting tables. That I could do, provided I could find someone to take over the cooking for me.

There was a lot of great storage in the kitchen, which gave me even more hope for the idea.

Once I’d explored the first floor, which seemed to go on forever with its multiple meeting rooms, an empty indoor pool, and even a small bar area, I wandered to the upper levels. Unlike the first floor, the rooms up there were all locked tight, forcing me to go back downstairs and rummage through drawers until I finally found a ring of keys in the bottom drawer of the reception desk.

I flipped through them until I found a key that fit the first door I came to. “Oh dear,” I said as I stepped into the room. “No wonder they didn’t fight to keep the place.” Unlike the first floor, the décor was clearly designed in the seventies. Brown shag carpet and orange, stained walls lined with velvet paintings. The ensuite bathroom was just as ugly.

I tried several more rooms, and honestly, a few had been redone in what must’ve been the eighties, but they were as outdated as the first.

I felt discouraged as I came out of the rooms and found the elevator. Before going up, I noticed a door labeled maintenance. I probably shouldn’t even be worried about that since I was going to have to sell or rent the place. I doubted my tiny budget would be enough to fix the mess I’d seen thus far.

Still, I might as well see what I was up against. I had to fiddle with the keys for quite some time before I finally came to the one that opened the maintenance door.

Unlike the other rooms, when this door opened I was assaulted with a musty, closed-up smell. I stepped inside and immediately shivered from the cold. “Is there no heating in here?” I asked the empty room.

The space had been turned into a utility room with access to the elevator machinery and a few buckets scattered about. I thought it strange they hadn’t utilized the space better, considering it was larger than the bedrooms I’d seen.

I closed the room, then walked over to the elevator and pressed the button. It took a moment to open and sounded a little rickety, if I was being honest, but this was an old building and nothing indicated the elevator wasn’t safe to ride. Might as well see it all , I thought as I stepped inside and pressed three. The elevator slowly shut and ground its way up to the third floor.

I stepped off and saw three doors facing me. I opened the first one and found the same ugly décor. I didn’t even go in. Same thing when I opened the second door, and I almost decided to forgo the third one—no need to look at any more hideousness. Something compelled me, though. “I guess I need to see it through,” I said to the empty corridor. Surprisingly, as I opened the door, I found myself in a more recently updated room. Apartment might actually be a better way to describe it.

It was far from modern, predating even the past decade, but at least there was no ugly seventies or eighties décor. Instead, the room was bright from the light coming through the multitude of windows lining the walls.

There was a living room, a full kitchen, and even a king-size bed in a bedroom off to the side. “You must be the presidential suite,” I said to the room. “You will also be my home, at least for the foreseeable future.”

Since my head was still pounding, I wasted no time fetching my luggage from the lobby and rode the very slow elevator back up to the third floor to get settled.

I popped my next pain pill, moaning that I only had one left. I locked the door, hoping that since I had the keys from the reception desk, I’d be relatively safe for the time being. I lay down on the luckily clean and neatly made bed and immediately fell asleep.

I could hear voices coming from under the door, and I felt myself get up to go look. The room was different from when I’d fallen asleep. I was clearly still in the same area, I could see out the window the same view that’d been there before, but the room was tiny, and the bed appeared to be a twin.

I cracked the door open and saw a young boy in the hallway, talking to a woman who appeared to be in her late twenties, although she wore very old-fashioned clothing.

She smiled at the boy as I heard them talking about him being afraid.

“Master Andre, your father made it clear you aren’t to be in the servants’ quarters,” she chastised, but there was affection in her voice.

The young boy, who appeared to be only five or six years old, nodded sadly. “Okay, come on,” she said and, taking his hand, led him down a flight of stairs that didn’t exist in the current building. In fact, the staircase occupied the same space as the elevator I’d taken to reach this floor.

I slipped out of my room and followed them to a room at the foot of the stairs that was clearly the boy’s nursery. “Okay, I’ll play one game of Old Maid, but then you must go to sleep,” the nanny said.

The boy smiled and rushed to a small cabinet under one of the windows. That was when I realized this was the maintenance room I’d seen before taking the elevator up to the third floor.

The nanny and the boy laughed as he beat her at the old card game. Neither of them noticed the shadowy figure emerge from a room down the hall and stop in front of the door, staring at them as they played.

From my vantage point in the hallway, I could feel anger emanating from him, but for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why he felt it so strongly. The nanny was clearly doing her job, entertaining the kid until she could get him back to bed, and he seemed more at ease than when upstairs.

“I told you bedtime was strictly at 7 p.m. You are to have the child in bed and to be in your room and not come out for any reason!” the man bellowed, causing both the boy and the woman to jump.

She stood and nodded at the man. “Master Andre had a nightmare, sir. I was simply consoling him until he could — ”

“Silence, woman. I didn’t give you leave to respond. Leave us, and I will handle this like it should’ve been!” he demanded.

The woman looked at the child, who was hunched over the cards. “Sir, if you allow it, I’ll put Master Andre to bed.”

“I said leave!” the man screamed, causing the woman to shriek and move toward the door.

As soon as she was in the hallway, the door slammed shut behind her, and I could hear the man shouting and what sounded like him hitting the boy.

The woman reached out to grasp the doorknob and go back inside when another woman appeared and put a hand over hers. When the nanny, her face still panicked, turned, the other woman shook her head. “You will only make it worse for him,” she said and, taking the nanny’s hand, pulled her up the stairs.

I followed the women back to what I assumed was the servants’ quarters, since that was what she’d said to the boy, as they lingered at the top of the stairs. “You can’t interfere. Just try to make sure the boy isn’t ever in a situation where his father will be angry.”

“Will he be okay?” the nanny asked.

The woman nodded. “I’ve been a maid here for just under a year. He’s, well, he has a heavy hand with the boy, but he’s gone a lot.” The woman hesitated, then sighed. “You should know he struck the last nanny, and she left and sued him. He paid for her silence, but you should be careful with that one,” she said, and looked down the stairs where I could now hear the wails of the little boy.

The women didn’t move when the seething man flung the door open and emerged from the room, not even when he looked up the stairs and saw them. His eyes narrowed to slits, but he simply turned and went back to what I assumed was his bedroom.

I woke and sat up in bed. What had I just seen? I ran my fingers through my hair and felt the still tender area where I’d hit my head in the fall the night before. Could concussions lead to wildly vivid dreams? That must be it , I thought, trying to explain away my unsettled feeling.

I dug through my pockets and found the business card the attorney had written the caretaker’s number on, and gave him a call.

When his voicemail answered, I decided to leave a message. “Hello, Mr. Beacroft. This is Evan Garland, from yesterday. Thank you for taking me to the hospital. By the way. I’m fine now. Anyway, I wondered if we could set up a time to meet and discuss the estate. I have a lot of questions.”