Toward the Sunrise (16 page)

“There’s not much to see,” Sophie hedged. “The crows have taken up residence in the east wing and have a nasty habit of attacking strangers. There are some postcards for sale if you are curious about what the Vandermark mansion looks like up close.”

“Thank you, but we will tour the mansion shortly and have no need of postcards.”

Sophie took a step back. The staff hired to maintain the estate had been walking a fine line for decades, and strangers were almost always discouraged. Almost . . . but not always. Any group that traveled with a butler must be people of means, and Sophie sometimes made exceptions for people willing to pay ridiculous sums to take a peek inside the house. The village needed all the revenue it could get.

“On rare occasions, arrangements can be made for a very select type of visitor,” she said. “It takes some time to arrange, for the estate is never open to visitors who arrive unannounced.”

“We’re not visitors,” Mr. Gilroy said in an implacable voice. “We are the Vandermarks. And we’ve come home to stay.”

Sophie scrambled up the steep footpath, heedless of the vines and shrubbery that slapped at her skirts as she raced toward the top of the cliff. Rutted with centuries of maple roots and corroded by
runoff, it was a treacherous path, but she had to hurry. Mr. Gilroy had told her that Quentin Vandermark, the great-grandson of the man found floating dead in the river, intended to take up residence in the house immediately. Today!

Which was a huge problem. No one had expected the family to ever return, and well . . . over the years, certain liberties had been taken with the house. Mostly by her. Some of it could be hidden, but she’d have to hurry. She hiked her skirts in one hand, using the other for balance as she scaled the hillside with careful steps. With each step higher, the air got sweeter and the leaves grew greener.

Despite the blather told to the tourists, Dierenpark wasn’t haunted. Quite the opposite, in fact. Sophie had no explanation for it, but every square inch of the Vandermark estate bloomed with health and abundance. It seemed like the blossoms were more vibrant, the grass softer and greener, and the fruit grown on the estate sweeter than anything harvested in the village.

A screen of weather-beaten juniper trees provided a windbreak at the edge of the property, sheltering Dierenpark and creating an isolated haven of beauty and peace at the top of the cliff. Built of granite block, Dierenpark was a sprawling mansion with gables, turrets, and mullioned windows. The oldest portion of the house was built in 1635, but over the centuries, it had been expanded to become a rambling mansion, one of the largest private homes in America.

Tearing across the meadow, she burst through the front door and barreled down the center hallway to the sun-filled kitchen at the rear of the house. It was in the newest part of the mansion, with plenty of windows to let in natural light. A fire burned in the brick hearth, and bundles of herbs hung alongside copper pots dangling over the scrubbed wooden work table.

“The Vandermarks are here!” Sophie gasped, doubling over from her frantic dash up the side of the cliff. “Quick, get the merchandise out of here, and hide everything else.”

Florence Hengeveld pushed herself off the stool where she’d been bagging up Dutch cookies to sell to the tourists. With a face withered like a dried apple and a widow’s hump slowing her walk, Florence had been the estate’s housekeeper for forty years. She was the “hunchback” mentioned by the tour guide. But Florence wasn’t a victim of the Vandermark curse. She was merely old, and old women often had a widow’s hump.

“What do you mean?” Florence asked. “The Vandermarks’ lawyer is here?”

For the past sixty years, the only contact they’d had with the Vandermarks was from a series of attorneys who paid their wages and settled the annual tax bill. So why had the family suddenly returned? Sophie bit her lip, praying they hadn’t heard rumors about the equipment she’d installed on the roof of the mansion.

“They’re here in person,” she said. “Quentin Vandermark and his son. I thought they were living in Europe, but they’re back, and they intend to take up residence today. Their carriage can’t get up the hill, so they’ve gone to get a lighter one and will be here any moment. Quick! Hide anything having to do with the tourists. I’ll find Emil to help.”

“He’s working on the garden fence,” Florence said as she shuffled to a cupboard, dumping the bags of Dutch cookies and shortbread out of sight.

Sophie ran outside, calling for Emil Broeder, a simple-hearted man with a rapidly expanding family, including twin boys and a baby daughter only two months old. He and his family lived in the old groundskeeper’s cabin a few acres away.

She found him repairing the fence that kept deer from plundering Sophie’s herb garden. In short order she dispatched him to the house to hide all evidence of their tourism business.

But the biggest problem was on the roof, and it wasn’t exactly something Sophie could hide. She would just hope the Vandermarks wouldn’t notice until she could smooth the waters. Surely, with so grand an estate, they’d never even notice the paltry structures Emil had helped her erect on the roof, would they?

Because in her long line of failed engagements and thwarted dreams, her tiny weather station on the top of the Vandermark mansion was what gave meaning and purpose to Sophie’s world. In a dying village where economic opportunities dwindled by the year, Sophie was part of a grand national experiment to create the first system of accurate and reliable weather forecasts for anyone who chose to buy the morning newspaper. She’d never asked permission to install the weather station, but the roof of Dierenpark was now one of three thousand monitoring stations manned by volunteers who gathered climate data in hopes of creating accurate weather predictions that would make the world a safer place for everyone.

And she prayed Quentin Vandermark would not interfere with that.

Sophie heard the Vandermarks before she saw them. The clopping of horse hooves and the bumping of carriage wheels across the rocky front drive sounded like impending doom. Florence had put a kettle on to heat, and a bowl of Sophie’s blueberry muffins and a Dutch sweet cake were at the center of the table, still warm from the oven and lending a comforting aroma of sweetened vanilla to the room.

Sophie sat at the kitchen table, rotating a mug of tea between her suddenly icy fingers. Why was she so anxious? They hadn’t done anything wrong . . . or at least, they hadn’t done anything the Vandermarks explicitly forbade them to do. It had been easy to feel like she belonged in this wonderful old house, but all that would change now that the real owners had returned. Sixty years—it had been
sixty years
—how was she supposed to know they would return with no warning?

Footsteps thudded up the porch steps. She had already unlocked the front door, since it would seem presumptuous to force Quentin Vandermark to knock for admittance into his own house.

He didn’t knock. The front door banged open, and more heavy footsteps clomped on the hardwood floors.

“Where is she?” An angry voice roared through the old house, echoing off the walnut paneling in the grand foyer and hurting her ears.

Sophie sprang to her feet and headed to the entrance hall, where the group of imposing men trudged into the house. Mr. Gilroy passed her a tense smile, but the man whose bellow had shaken the rafters was a stranger to her. He was a slender man who leaned heavily on a cane as he lurched around the entrance hall. With dark hair and stormy gray eyes, his lean face was drawn tight with anger.

“Where is she?” he roared again as he limped toward the formal parlor, raising his cane long enough to strike at the draperies. Dust motes swirled in the air, and she feared the fragile silk might rip and come tearing down.

“Are you looking for me?” she asked calmly. Fighting fire with fire was rarely a good idea, and Sophie refused to do it.

He whirled around, shooting her a scorching glare. “Are you the one who has been telling ghost stories to my son? The one who terrified him so badly we can’t get him out of the carriage?”

His voice lashed like a whip, and he was so daunting it was hard to look him in the face. Even the burly men in the grand foyer seemed cowed.

“Somehow I doubt I’m the cause of the boy’s anxiety, Mr. Vandermark.”

The man’s eyes narrowed as he plodded across the parquet floor to scrutinize her. He would be a handsome man were he not so ferociously angry. With a lean face and high cheekbones, he looked like something straight out of a Brontë novel, and apparently he had the temper to match.

“Are you the person responsible for turning my home into an obscene tourist attraction? The one selling postcards and cookies down by the pier?”

“My name is Sophie van Riijn. I provide meals to the staff at the house, but I am not on your payroll, nor am I the cause of whatever has put you into a foul mood. I’d be happy to welcome you inside and get you all something to eat and drink. I imagine you are tired after your journey.”

Mr. Gilroy stepped forward, unruffled by the raging tantrum of his employer. “Thank you, Miss van Riijn. We would be grateful.”

Quentin Vandermark acted as though he hadn’t heard. Leaning both hands on his cane, he scanned the impressive rooms on either side of the entrance hall. He seemed particularly fascinated by the portraits of a dozen Vandermark ancestors from earlier centuries, their powdered wigs looking strange to modern eyes. What must this man be thinking as he saw his ancestral estate for the first time? Sophie had been coming to this house since she was a child, but everything was new to Mr. Vandermark. He would need a guide just to find his way through the forty-room mansion.

“If you’ll follow me to the kitchen, we have a kettle warming and some fresh blueberry muffins. I’m sorry we did not know of your arrival or we’d have prepared the dining room. Will Pieter be joining us?”

Mr. Vandermark tore his gaze from the old portraits. “He is in the carriage with his governess. I don’t want him in the house until we establish the ground rules. My son has had a difficult year and is
prone to fits of anxiety. Filling his head with tales of his ancestors floating dead in the river and people turning into hunchbacks from setting foot in this house is going to stop at once. Is that clear, Miss van Riijn?”

“Perfectly.”

“And whoever is selling postcards with photographs of this home will cease and desist immediately.”

Sophie tilted her head. “Artists and photographers have been featuring this house on their postcards for decades. We aren’t responsible for that.”

Reaching inside his coat, he grabbed a postcard and waved it in her face. “This postcard shows the
inside
of the house. Someone let them in to take those photographs, and I demand to know who.”

Sure enough, the postcard he clenched in his fist was of the drawing room, sunlight streaming through the windows and fresh flowers in vases placed about the room. For scale, a little blond girl stood beside the fireplace, a bouquet of tulips in her hands. The photograph had been taken by her father more than twenty years ago, and Sophie was the little child, but she doubted Mr. Vandermark would recognize her.

“I believe that photograph was taken decades ago,” she said. “I doubt you’ll discover who is responsible. There has been a lot of turnover here at the house.”

“So I gather. Dead people stumbling over rakes and dying of terrible diseases. Such charming tales you tell.”

“Mr. Vandermark, the tour guides on the steamboats are all from Manhattan. If you have a complaint with their services, you will need to return to the city and take it up with them. All we do is tend to the house. Florence has the tea ready, if you’d like to follow me to the kitchen.”

She didn’t wait for a reply, but given the lumbering footsteps behind her, the men followed. Both Florence and Emil rose as they heard the group approach. Emil swept the cap from his head, brushing his straw-colored hair from his forehead with a nervous hand.

“This is Florence Hengeveld, the housekeeper here for more than forty years. And Emil Broeder has been keeping the grounds ever since he took over for his father two years ago.”