Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Present Day
I t shouldn’t have been so easy to buy the Grayson Estate.
But with a bit of minor finagling from Becca, the financial planner, Rose left the real estate office with the keys just one week after she’d seen the flyer in Charlie’s woodworking shop. A smile played across her lips. I can still surprise myself, she thought.
But Rose wasn’t fully sure she wanted to step through the ancient doors of the Grayson Estate by herself—not without proper assistance. It was clear the property was damaged and potentially dangerous. She needed someone to do another thorough inspection to tell her where she could go and what she could do as she plotted and schemed her way to refurbishing it in time for next year’s tourist rush.
Rose contacted Charlie first thing. She knew he had experience in that world, and he agreed to meet her at the Grayson Estate first thing in the morning.
He also said:
I can’t believe you bought it.
ROSE: Call it a late midlife crisis.
CHARLIE: Magical things come out of midlife crises sometimes.
ROSE: Let’s hope this is one of those times!
The Salt Sisters’ group chat was all over the place about the news.
HILARY: Tourism is gold around here. I think it’s a brilliant idea.
TINA: Isn’t that place haunted?
ROSE: It’s haunted by the events of my life, but it’s not haunted for anyone else. I don’t think it is, anyway.
STELLA: You don’t sound totally convinced it’s not haunted. Should we call the Ghostbusters to swing by, just in case?
ROBBY: Didn’t the Ghostbusters retire?
HILARY: There has to be a new generation of Ghostbusters. It’s the 21st century. Times are changing.
Rose giggled to herself, reading the messages out on the veranda of the home she’d bought and fixed up for herself going on fifteen years ago. The house was not far from Hilary’s place, with an elaborate rose garden, quaint brickwork that reminded her of old-world German architecture, her fingernail crescent of white sandy beach, and plenty of room to roam around. She’d always lived here alone—
although there had been a boyfriend in her mid-forties who’d nearly moved in before they’d both gotten cold feet and separated. Rose thought of him fondly, though they hadn’t spoken to one another in many years at this point. Another chapter of my life, she remembered. Another thing I had to say goodbye to.
Rose had been flat-broke when she’d first met Stella and Hilary in 2004. Hilary’s offer for her to move in had enlivened her up to a point. It also reminded her of the definition of her life: other people would always be wealthy. Not her.
But that had changed. Miraculously. Insanely.
Set on remaining in Nantucket no matter what, Rose had moved into a quaint apartment after leaving Hilary’s place and put herself to work. She’d waitressed; she’d worked at the movie theater; she’d scrubbed floors and tutored high school students and paid every single one of her bills on time.
But it wasn’t till she discovered her artistic side that the money rolled in.
Rose had always enjoyed making art and using her hands. During her stint at Hilary’s, she’d helped Hilary paint several rooms in the house and gave advice on carpeting, drapes, and artwork. Hilary had said at the time, You have a sharp eye for detail, Rosie. Rose had brushed it off.
Two or three years after her stay with Hilary, Rose discovered a canvas on sale at a secondhand place and bought it for three bucks. Paints were more complicated to come by, but she eventually wrangled some from an acquaintance of Hilary’s who’d taken up painting briefly before abandoning it for what he called his “true hobby,” which involved partying on sailboats.
That first painting had been relatively conservative in form and function. Rose had selected the Nantucket lighthouse as a subject and spent a good two weeks perfecting it. Not long after, she showed it to Hilary, who immediately set her up with an art dealer named Oriana Coleman. Oriana sold the painting for what Rose took to be a small fortune. Ten thousand dollars. Oriana urged her to paint more.
Rose did.
In fact, Rose spent the next twelve years exclusively painting her way across three hundred and sixty-two canvases. She painted anything that came into her head: lighthouses and beach bluffs and ancient houses, majestic horses, pancake spreads, and children holding ice cream cones. A few very rich people reached out to her to ask to have their portrait painted because the very rich were always narcissistic. But Rose didn’t mind. She profited off their narcissism. More than that, she adored painting portraits, digging into the soul of the person and seeing them for who they were.
It was with this cash that Rose could purchase this property along the water. With this artistic name, she could bounce from painting as a medium to something far more adventurous: sculpture.
Now, Rose abandoned the veranda and padded downstairs to her studio. The studio was the biggest room of the house, with walls twenty feet high and a massive window that echoed back to the view of the Nantucket Sound. A chandelier twinkled its lights from the ceiling.
Rose had assembled Charlie’s spare wood in the corner of the room. She had plans for it, but it would have to wait till after she finished her current piece—an all-stone abstract sculpture she’d already sold for more than half a million dollars to a friend of a friend of Hilary’s famous daughter. “Ingrid’s friends cannot believe she has a connection to you,” Hilary told Rose after Ingrid returned to her life. “They can’t believe they have an exclusive connection!”
It was often strange for Rose to remember the mighty twists and turns of her life. How did I get here? How did any of this happen?
But it had.
Rose wasn’t immune to impostor syndrome. But she was getting better and better at pushing it aside, which counted for something.
Charlie agreed to meet Rose at the Grayson Estate the following morning at eight thirty. He came with a few members of a local construction crew, all of whom wore hard hats and boots with inch-thick bottoms.
Rose led the men through the grounds of the Grayson Estate and up to the stone structure. A stone porch remained with those questionable pillars and led up to a crooked doorway that looked as though it had been rattled with an earthquake. The construction guys told Rose to hang back and wait while they entered the house. Rose resented being told to remain. But she also hadn’t brought a hard hat and was wearing a pair of canvas shoes. Rookie mistake, she thought now as she wrung her hands.
It was a chilly day, lower sixties, and the wind rolled off the Nantucket Sound and swatted her curls around her face. She cupped her elbows and gazed at the forest separating this stone fortress from the Walden Estate. When was the last time she’d been there? It must have been the day she quit.
The Walden Estate was still owned by the family, of course. Rose knew that the children returned to the estate every summer with their own children and probably with their own babysitters. She wasn’t sure if either of the elder Waldens were still alive, although they weren’t so old. Mid-sixties, maybe seventies. It was hard for Rose to envision them as anything but their gorgeous and well-dressed and beautiful selves.
Rose grabbed her phone and Googled their names but found nothing beyond a few articles about their “magnanimous contributions to Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.” Rose had heard a rumor that they’d only sent these funds to ensure their children would secure beautiful futures at an Ivy League university. She’d heard another, darker rumor that they’d had to send even more funds to Yale after Kate or Evie had gotten into trouble. Rose was pretty sure it involved vandalism, although most journalists knew to keep hush-hush about the matters of such a prosperous family.
It wasn’t hard for Rose to imagine any of the Walden children getting into trouble. It was hard to imagine that they’d ever grown up fully, though. Evie had been four in 1993, which made her thirty-five this summer. That put Hogarth at forty-one!
Rose shivered. Time was a slippery thing. Did they remember her? She’d only worked for the Waldens that summer and autumn back in 1993. It stood to reason that their memories of her had been stamped out with those of other babysitters and governesses. Rose wasn’t special.
Rose googled Hogarth and discovered he’d become a mega-millionaire in his own right—with initial help from Daddy’s millions, of course. Hogarth had founded and sold several million-dollar companies on his own and peered out from LinkedIn photographs that made him look like a prosperous professional. A bit of online digging made it seem like he’d divorced his first wife and married his secretary, but it was difficult for Rose to get the full story based on a few clicks.
Not long after that, Charlie called her name. “It’s all clear! Come on through!”
Rose’s throat was so tight that it was difficult to breathe. She shoved her phone into her pocket and delicately went up the stone steps.
How many times had she wondered about this place? How many times had she begged to come inside?
Now, here she was on the precipice. And she owned it! Nobody could tell her to turn away!
The place was just as haunted-looking as the Salt Sisters suspected. After the fire, the Graysons had done very little to clean the place up and had even left many of their once-immaculate items lost in the debris of stones, ash, and fallen wood. But because the old house was built with stone and iron, the foundation was solid. It meant it was rife for Rose’s visions for refurbishment.
Maybe Rose would even hang a photograph in the foyer of what the house had once looked like—before and after the fire. Maybe she’d stitch the story of the house into the advertisement for the bed and breakfast.
Rose followed the sound of Charlie and the construction workers’ voices and discovered them at the edge of what had once been a ballroom-dining room area. Miraculously, the dome of the room hadn’t collapsed during the fire, although Charlie was fearful about what would happen once Rose attacked it with her “plans.”
“If you want to keep the original roof, it needs to be stabilized first thing,” Charlie told her. “There is no walking through this room under any circumstances until that happens.”
Rose saluted him. “Roger, captain.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “I’m serious. If this falls, there’s no getting out of the rubble.”
Someone had painted the entire map of the stars upon the dome ceiling. It seemed outrageous that they were still visible, especially long after the fire, as the structure had sat here abandoned and without care for thirty-one years. But there they were: a splendorous array of the Big Dipper, Sagittarius, Aquila, and Centaurus. Rose’s eyes filled with tears. She’d imagined the place to be specific, detail-oriented, and beautiful, but this was beyond her wildest dreams.
“Do you remember the rumors that went around about the fire?” Charlie asked now.
Rose cast him a look that meant duh.
Charlie laughed and snapped his hand across his thigh. “Wait a minute. I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to put this all together.”
Rose’s heart pumped. He’d figured it out. But hadn’t Rose wanted him to?
You can’t leave anything in the past, not in Nantucket. Everyone in Nantucket remembers everything. Collective memory is a terrifying thing.
The construction workers looked at Rose with buggy, curious eyes.
Rose rolled her head in a circle and considered whether or not to explain herself.
Finally, she came out with a weak, “I knew the man who owned the house when it burned down.”
The construction workers continued to look at her, waiting for another layer of information that wasn’t coming.
Rose didn’t want to show all of her cards. Not yet.
Charlie gave her a look that meant: Someday, you’re going to tell me the entire story. But Rose couldn’t imagine speaking it aloud.
Charlie clapped his hand on her shoulder and beamed. “Why don’t we give the construction crew a few days to go through the rest of the house? It’s massive. They can stabilize things for you—things like those pillars outside, those walls.”
The construction worker bobbed his head. “I want to bring another guy in to check out these roofs.”
Rose could hardly believe she was having this conversation. She’d never dreamed she’d ever see the interior of the Grayson Estate. But here she was, enraptured in the daydream of a place she’d thought lost to time.
She was a part of that time, in a way, she thought now. She owed patience to the old place. She owed it artistry and hope so many years after it had been abandoned.