The Midnight Estate #9
“I dropped out of college the minute my first advance came through, and you never made it at all. We’ve done just fine for ourselves.”
“It’s different for her. University will make her life easier. She has to learn how to study and how to stand on her own two feet. If she’s educated she will be able to think for herself.”
“She has to learn to dream. To imagine! These years of her life are made for play, not study.”
Silas decided to approach the problem from another angle, taking it upon himself to make sure the rest of her life was full
of magic. When he drove Cynthia to school he told her stories the whole way. He made up ghost stories about their home—not
frightening tales, but stories about spirits who were fun or even funny, mischievous imps who distracted him and kept him
entertained when he was working. There were fairies in the garden and shapes in the clouds and every chance he got, he had
that little girl playing games of make-believe with Ernest or even on her own.
Silas respected Marie’s wishes for her daughter, but he knew with absolute certainty that a child who does not learn to imagine becomes an adult who cannot dream. An adult who cannot create!
Silas would never allow that to happen. Not on his watch.
As the years stretched into decades, Silas saw the scars Marie still carried in every facet of her life. She still battled
panic when a door slammed in the wind or a car backfired. She still doubted herself constantly, second-guessing just about
every decision she ever made. She held people at arms’ length—even Cynthia at times—as if she were afraid that letting down
her guard for even a second might reveal the truth about herself and bring her whole life tumbling down around her. And Marie
remained utterly terrified of that secret buried in the backyard.
From time to time Silas would talk about projects he should really get around to in the mansion—new paint, adjustments to
the landscaping outside, installing air conditioning units, even repairing various things as they aged. Marie reacted every
single time as if he’d threatened to walk outside and dig that body up with his bare hands.
“Mae, there’s no risk to . . . that . . . if we change the house and yard a little,” he’d say impatiently, but she would turn white as a sheet and her hands would
start to shake.
“Then where does it stop, Silas?” she’d ask unevenly. “What if you try to renovate the kitchen and there’s a busted pipe and
the tradesmen dig it up and they end up in that corner? What if you want to put an air conditioning unit into the ballroom
and they need to trench a new power line in and—”
“The switchboard is on the house! There is no conceivable way they’d need to dig a trench a hundred yards away to run power to an a/c unit on the other side of the building.”
“But once you start messing with these things, who knows how far it goes! Who knows what they will unearth.”
And he hated, God how he hated, to see her so upset, so he always dropped it just to calm her. But privately, Silas worried. Her fears around
their secret were so irrational, he had the sense that she wouldn’t—couldn’t—ever let them go. And how would she ever cope
carrying their secret alone if he happened to die first? One day, Silas called his lawyer and had his will updated, and then
he sat Marie down and handed her a copy.
“What’s this?” She frowned.
“I wanted you to see.”
“You’re only fifty, Silas. You don’t need to be worrying about this.”
“That sounds like something I would say in response to you saying something like ‘It’s never too early for estate planning.’”
“Ha ha. Why did you do this?”
“Read it,” he murmured.
He saw her eyes running across the page, the little furrow he knew so well knit between her brows. After a few minutes she
looked up at him.
“You’re leaving the house to Ernest.”
“Yes. He doesn’t want it. We both know he’ll give it to Cynthia.”
“But . . .” She looked down at the page. “No sale. No restoration. You’re making sure she doesn’t come in and . . .”
“It doesn’t matter what happens after we’re both gone. The lawyer tells me I can’t enforce this but . . .”
“The kids would respect it anyway.”
“I would think so, yes.”
“Will Cynthia be hurt if you leave Ernest this house? We all know he still hates the place,” Marie said hesitantly.
“She and Ernest will figure it out together. I just wanted you to know that you can leave this place behind and move on with your life. It’s time.”
Not long after that day, Marie married a kindly farmer, and she and Cynthia moved out. Silas had promised them he’d be fine
in the mansion alone—and he was, for the most part. The place had never felt so empty or so draughty or so lonely, but he had his work, and he was happy.
Silas had learned over the years that sometimes a piece of writing takes on a mind of its own. The author sets out to capture
one moment and ends up with words which entirely mark another. He wanted to write about a young man rising out of poverty, but what wound up on the pages instead was the story of the greatest thing
he’d ever done. He had refused to turn away when he suspected someone was in dire need of help. That act of charity had complicated
just about every moment of his life from that day on, but he would never regret it, not for a second. In making a choice to
do the kind thing—the inconvenient thing, the uncomfortable thing—he had saved someone so very worthy of saving. He had changed two wonderful lives for the better.
That was a story that demanded telling, and he was powerless to refuse.
Silas wrote in fits and starts. He wrote a page here and a dozen pages there and then he set the thing aside for two years,
only to pick it up again the next time it came to mind. When he reached parts he was unsure of—what was said, what the weather
was like, what someone was thinking—his imagination took flight and filled in the gaps. But the essence of it, the very core of it—that was the truest thing he ever wrote even after decades of bleeding his very soul onto pages.
Silas finished writing not long after his sixty-third birthday. In the years he had been writing it, he had also written other
books, stories he won awards for and stories that conquered best-seller lists. He always knew this story was different. It could never be allowed to find a wide commercial market. It would never attract the praise of judges
or critics. It could never have his real name on the spine.
And yet, he found he wanted very much to share it anyway. It might not have been his best writing, but it was the story of
his best work. The question was: How to share it? Silas had wished a million or more times over the years that he could tell Ernest the truth because the boy had
been tortured by that experience as a child, but he could not put the burden of the whole story upon his son—he just couldn’t.
Ernest and Cynthia remained blessedly, beautifully close-knit into adulthood, the kind of relationship that would long outlive
their parents, and the story that would help Ernest understand his own fear would rock the very foundations of Cynthia’s life.
The answer came to him early one morning, as he was walking along the roads near the mansion at sunrise. Glorious golden light
washed over him and the fields around him were crisp with frost and his family were all happy and thriving in their lives
and he thought to himself, The world is a very big place. He’d simply find some other pocket, somewhere far from Forbes and far from California, and he’d have it published there.
Maybe, just maybe, someone would one day read these words from his heart and be inspired in Maeve’s honor to change their
own world for the better. That was the power of the kindness he had learned from his sister. That was the power of story.