Maybe This Time (5 page)

“Not military school. We'll put you in public school. In Columbus. There are very good schools there.” She looked at Alice.

Alice kept eating, her headphones blocking all other sound.

“She won't go,” Mrs. Crumb said, her voice fat with satisfaction. “You don't understand—”

“Mrs. Crumb, do you want to remain employed?” Andie said. “Because right now, it's not looking good for you.”

The housekeeper glared at her, and Andie stared back, unimpressed.

After a moment, Mrs. Crumb pursed her painted lips and sat down across the table from where Andie stood, forcing a smile. “We got off to a bad start.”

“Yes,” Andie said, waiting to see what her next move was.

“There are things about this house you don't know,” Mrs. Crumb said, leaning forward, and Carter stopped eating to watch her. “It's a big house, there's
history
in this house. I've been here all my life, since I was sixteen, I
know
this house. You need me.”

Carter went back to his mac and cheese and Andie thought,
That's not what he was expecting.
“The history of the house isn't important to me. The kids are.”

“It ain't just the history,” Mrs. Crumb said, her eyes dark. “There's things here you can't understand.”

“Ghosts?”
How dumb do you think I am?
“I don't believe in ghosts. I do believe in nutrition and basic curriculum skills, so that's what I'll be concentrating on.”

Mrs. Crumb dropped her voice. “Some things you can't believe are real.”

“Like this stuff you're feeding the children.” Andie looked at the orange smears left in Alice's bowl as she polished off the last of her pasta. “I've never seen macaroni and cheese that color before. Does it glow in the dark?”

Mrs. Crumb got up and took the children's bowls. “We should get along, you and me. You're going to need me.”

Andie looked at the old woman's cold little eyes.
Jesus, I hope not.
“I'd like to see my bedroom, please.”

“I'll show you everything,” Mrs. Crumb said, her defiance back. “I'll just show you.”

“Just my bedroom,” Andie said, but Mrs. Crumb had already headed for a door in the far wall, so she smiled one last time at the kids, picked up her suitcase, and followed the housekeeper.

It was going to be a long month.

 

Andie followed Mrs. Crumb into a short dismal hallway with faded wallpaper and a worn wood floor. The housekeeper turned to go up a narrow flight of equally worn wooden stairs that were probably the servant stairs, and then she stopped on the first step, her watery, protruding eyes even with Andie's now.

“I hope you didn't get the wrong idea,” she began. “I'm sure Mr. Archer just forgot to tell me—” She looked past Andie and scowled.
“Now what are you doing out here?” she snapped, and Andie turned and saw Alice standing behind her, looking even smaller and thinner than she had in the kitchen, her neck festooned with all that jewelry, the headphones from her Walkman still over her ears.

“Hello, Alice,” Andie said.

The deep shadows under Alice's eyes and cheekbones made her little face almost skull-like. She stared at Andie for a minute and then pushed past her and Mrs. Crumb and began to climb the stairs, something stuffed under her arm.

Andie reached out and touched her sleeve and Alice jerked away and kept going.

“Is that a doll?” Andie asked, and Alice stopped a couple of steps above her and took her headphones off.

She held up a stuffed doll with a bluish-white head, its three-tiered sepia-toned skirt flaring out from a faded gold ribbon belt around its lumpy waist. The thing looked like it had been left to mold before Alice had found it, the face and dress mottled with age. “It's Jessica,” Alice said and went on up the stairs.

It's dead,
Andie thought.

“She won't give that up,” Mrs. Crumb said, in her idea of a whisper. “I've tried giving her other dolls but she just wants that one. It's not right. We should do something about that, you and me.”

Andie watched Alice's straight little back climb the stairs without wavering even though she must have heard the housekeeper's voice. “If that's the doll Alice wants, that's the doll she gets.”

Mrs. Crumb sucked in her breath and shook her head and then continued up the stairs.

They reached another short hall on the second floor, and Mrs. Crumb walked around the stairwell and started up another flight. “Nursery's on the third floor. Keeps the noise down.”

“Noise?” Andie said, following an entirely silent Alice, but Mrs. Crumb didn't speak again until they were on the third-floor landing in another cramped little hall.

“This is the bathroom,” she said proudly, opening a door opposite the stairs that led to a large vintage washroom with a freestanding brass-and-frosted-glass shower in the middle of the hardwood floor. “You're sharing this with me. My room's on the other side”—she nodded toward the front of the house—“but I know you won't mind since we're going to be such good friends.” Then she moved toward the back of the house to a door that was ajar because Alice had walked through it moments before.

“This is your bedroom,” Mrs. Crumb said, pushing the door open wider.

Andie followed her into a large, high-ceilinged paneled room, dominated by a four-poster bed and a stone mantel surrounding a gas fireplace. The long stone-lined windows looked out over the old woods behind the house, and Andie could hear the last calls of the crows in the flushed sky.

“And that's the nursery through there.” Mrs. Crumb jerked her thumb at a door to the right that was also ajar, probably from Alice walking through it, too. “I'm going to go make you a nice hot toddy now. Just the thing to help you drop off to sleep.” She smiled again, and again it didn't reach her eyes, and then she went back out through the hall door.

“Hot toddy,” Andie said, not even sure what that was, and walked over to the open door and looked through it.

The nursery was huge, maybe thirty feet across, with a bank of barred windows across the back including a little bay-windowed alcove with a window seat full of books spilling onto the floor. There were two narrow twin beds, their mattresses naked, an ancient rocker with chipped white paint, a rump-sprung old sofa, a battered table with paper and pencils on it and several mismatched chairs scattered around it, and an old TV in the middle of the room with an ancient boom box on top of it. At the far end was a cold gas fireplace with a small, modern fire extinguisher on the mantel. It was about as cozy as an abandoned mental hospital.

Andie crossed the room and opened a door on the other side and found herself in another short hall. In front of her the door was open to a small bathroom, to the right was a stone archway to another hall, and to the left was a closed door.

Jesus,
she thought.
This place is Little Gormenghast. I'm going to get lost here and never be found.

She opened the door to the left and found Alice sitting on a twin bed, leaning toward an old white rocker at the foot of the bed. The walls were pink, her bedside table had a pink lamp, and her bedspread was pink and covered with daisies.

“This is my room!” Alice said, straightening as she clutched her blue Jessica doll to all the jewelry on her thin little chest. “You have to knock before you come in!”

Andie surveyed the little room, puzzled. “Do you like pink?”

“No!”

“I didn't think so. Sorry about not knocking.”

Andie closed the door and then crossed the small hall into the larger one and found another staircase on her left, this one stone and much grander, and to her right a massive stone archway. On the wall in front of her was another door, so she opened it.

Carter jerked back against his headboard, his eyes wide, almost dropping the comic book he'd been reading. Then he saw her and scowled. “You ever hear of knocking?”

“Sorry,” Andie said. “I can't tell which doors are rooms and which ones are halls.”

“This one's a room,” Carter said, and went back to his comic.

Andie looked around the room and saw ancient heavy furniture and a bed covered with old blankets in various shades of drab. The only interesting things in the whole room were the stacks of comic books, papers, and pencils on the bedside tables that said Carter did something besides glare and eat, and the carpet at the end of the bed that was riddled with scorch marks.
Pyro,
she thought, and was grateful
the house was mostly stone. She looked up to see Carter watching her, his face stolid, so she nodded and began to close the door only to stop when she took a second look at his bedside table.

There was a lighter on it, a cheap plastic job. She opened the door wider and saw two more on the other table.

He was still staring at her, and she thought about saying, “What in the name of God do you need three lighters for?” But it was her first night and Carter already didn't like her and she was too damn tired.

“Don't set anything on fire,” she told him, and closed the door.

Then she walked through the stone arch on her right and almost ran into an ancient wood railing that ran around three sides of an open space. The railing rocked a little as she put her hands on it, so she looked over the edge carefully.

The opening dropped two stories down to a stone floor, empty in the growing darkness.

Okay, then,
Andie thought, and made a circuit of the gallery, discovering doors that led into the nursery and into the servants' stairwell. Then she went back to the little hall and to Alice's room, where she knocked.

“Go away,” Alice said.

Andie went in and saw that Alice had changed into a too-large jersey T-shirt that hung down past her knees, clearly a hand-me-down from some adult. She looked both pathetic—poor little Alice had to get ready for bed on her own—and eerie—poor little Alice's shirt said
BAD WITCH
on it in glowing green letters. She looked oddly defenseless without her armor of necklaces—they were hanging over her lampshade now—but with her white-blond hair standing out every which way, she also looked demented.
We'll comb that tomorrow,
Andie thought.

“Sorry,” she told Alice. “I just wanted to say that if you need me, I'm on the other side of the nursery.”

“I won't need you.” Alice got into bed and pulled her covers over her head.

“Right.” Andie noticed that Jessica had fallen to the floor. “You dropped something.” She bent and picked up the old doll and poked Alice under the covers.

“Hey!” Alice said, and then Andie pulled back the covers and handed her the doll.

“Good night,” Andie said, and Alice pulled her covers up over her head again.

“Yes, we're going to be great pals,” Andie said, and headed back across the nursery to her own room, thinking that it was no surprise the nannies had cracked. They'd probably expected to be put living in the tomb at any moment, probably by Carter and Alice.

She heard something from the hallway by Alice's room and went back to check. Alice's door had come partly open, and inside Alice was talking.

“She's not staying,” Alice was saying. “She's just going to be here a month. She's not even a nanny. It's okay. We're staying right here.”

Andie pushed open the door a little more, expecting to see Carter, and Alice looked around, alone in her room.

“I
told you,
” she began.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody,” Alice said, turning her head toward the wall.

Imaginary friend,
Andie thought, and said, “Okay.”

Then she turned to go and saw the white rocker at the end of the bed.

It was rocking.

She looked back at Alice, who met her eyes defiantly.

“What?” Alice said.

She did that,
Andie thought, and said, “Nothing. Good night,” and closed the door, now in complete sympathy with the nannies who'd bolted.

Anybody with sense would.

•  •  •

Andie put the weirdness that was Alice and Carter out of her mind and spent the next hour unpacking and settling into her new room. It was surprisingly charming: white paneled walls and high, sculpted ceilings and long stone-lined windows covered with full, patterned draperies that clashed with the incongruously cheap silver-patterned black comforter that somebody with a lot of romance in her soul and no money in her checking account had bought to cover the large walnut four-poster bed. The rest of the furniture in the room was a mixture of styles probably inherited from different parts of the house as hand-me-downs, and the crowning touch was a cheap metal plaque over the bed that said
ALWAYS KISS ME GOOD NIGHT
. There was something a little obsessive about that which, given Andie's surroundings, leaked over into creepiness. She put her pajamas on, brushed her teeth in the bathroom, put Kristin's folder about the kids on the bed, and then, looking at the “Archer Legal Group” label on the folder, went to find her jewelry box. Buried at the bottom in a small manila envelope was her wedding ring, pretty and cheap, now painted and varnished to keep it from tarnishing again, the last thing she had left from her marriage. She should have thrown it out since it was worthless, but . . .

She slid the ring on her left hand and smiled in spite of herself, remembering North going crazy trying to replace it with a real gold ring that wouldn't turn her finger green. Then she put the jewelry box away and was pulling back the covers when she heard a knock at the hall door and opened it to see Mrs. Crumb with a small tray. “A little cuppa before bed,” the housekeeper trilled, her red cupid's-bow mouth smiling tightly, as she put the tray on the table next to the bed. “I got no problem bringing you up a cuppa every night since it's only going to be a month?” She let her voice rise at the end, part question, part hope.