Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
K risten Shields took a moment on the third-floor landing, which also had a sofa, a table, a lamp, and a reading nook, to catch her breath. This floor spanned as many square feet as the others but housed mostly bedrooms in addition to a beautiful, brilliant, big library.
Today had dawned frosty and cold, with not very many people in the holiday house. She, Jean, Tessa, Clara, and Tessa’s boyfriend, Dave, were going to be setting up the stations in the library for the charity kits.
Kristen had not requested a room on the first floor, but Eloise had given her one anyway, and it was a good thing. When she finally felt like she wouldn’t faint, she continued toward the library. If she had to climb all those steps every night to go to bed or grab something from her room that she’d forgotten, Kristen felt certain she wouldn’t last until Christmas.
And that wouldn’t do, because she’d rolled two basked of Christmas gifts into the house. She wanted everyone to have something on Christmas morning, no matter what. She knew each person in the manor had someone else who cared enough about them to get them something for Christmas, but she wanted them to all know that she did too.
For a while there, right after her husband had died, Kristen thought she would lose everything. Not only had she lost the love of her life, but she’d lost the image and the person she’d believed him to be, as secrets came to light in the cove.
As her girls returned to the island community where they’d all grown up, Kristen feared they’d never speak to her again. But the opposite had been true. They’d brought her right back into their fold, as if she were one of them, and as they added new people—new women who needed the love and support of others, who needed to talk through major life decisions they were making in their forties—Kristen had found that her heart had room for each of them too.
Not only that, but she loved the men who loved her women, and she wanted them to know that she saw their good hearts and the way they took care of those around them.
She knew a tie or a wallet or a new belt didn’t mean that much, but she hoped the fact that someone had thought about a person would shine through in her simple gifts.
Now, though, as she approached the library, she found the double-wide doors had been thrown open and secured with door stops. Light poured in from the back of the room as Tessa had arrived ahead of her and opened all of the curtains.
“This place is magnificent,” Tessa said. She normally worked at the Five Island Cove Library on Diamond Island, but it was a part-time position, and she didn’t have to go in today. Her boyfriend Dave owned a soda and cookie shop, and he said they would be fine without him for a few days.
Tessa wore her love of literature and books right on her face as she swept into Kristen’s arms and hugged her. “I can’t even imagine having a library like this.” She stepped back and turned to it, sweeping her arm across the whole thing at once. “I mean, just look at it.”
Kristen looked, and everything she saw caused more awe to flow through her. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases took up three of the walls, with the windows providing the fourth. Cozy couches, chairs, and bean bags lined the area in front of the windows, clearly the reading area.
Tables filled some of the space between the seating area and the door where Kristen stood. Laurel wanted the stations for the Care and Comfort Kits set up there, with the food packages being assembled in one of the three ports in the garage.
As so many people were coming and going from the house this month, Laurel figured they could bring back a few paperback books or several sticks of deodorant or a pair of slippers purchased specifically for one of the kits. And throughout the month, they would build the fifteen kits that Laurel wanted to donate to A Very Veteran Christmas.
Kristen had become an expert in online shopping in recent years, and she had already ordered several items from Laurel’s list to be delivered straight to The Starlight Manor. She wasn’t planning to return to her condo until she had to, and she hoped her continued presence would provide some sense of stability for anyone coming and going. She wasn’t the only one staying the whole time, a fact for which she was grateful, for she didn’t fancy staying in the manor alone at night.
But nothing too crazy had happened since the big group dinner on Saturday night, where Kelli and AJ had argued and then the lights had gone haywire.
“Have you been in here before?” Tessa asked.
“No,” Kristen said. “This is the first time I’ve climbed all the way to the third floor.” She smiled at Tessa and then Dave. “Wow, let me tell you, once you get up here, there’s no going back down.”
Tessa laughed with her. “It is a lot of steps.”
Kristen had counted thirty-six, to be exact, and that was thirty-six more than she thought her doctor would advise her to take with her almost eighty-year-old knees.
“So, what do we have going on?” she asked, turning her attention to the tables in front of her.
“Dave just figured out how to get the printer to work,” Tessa said. “So he’s going to be labeling areas on each of the tables for the kits.” She held her arm straight out in front of her. “There are six tables in here, so we figured we’d use five of them, straight in a row. We can do the comfort kits here, and then straight down this row?—”
She stepped down several feet to the other end of the table. “—We could do care kits. That way, it’s easy to see if a kit is missing, say, a blanket or a pair of slippers or a book or a gift card. The sixth table can just be used for whatever. Maybe the teens will have homework or something?”
She looked at Kristen, who nodded. “I’m sure the teens will have homework, but I’m not sure they’ll come to the library to do it.”
Tessa looked like Kristen had just insulted her mother, but she shook it off as Dave laid down a paper that read Care Kit 1 in front of her.
“Laurel and Paul brought some things,” Tessa said. “They’re on the table way down there, and we’ll organize them.”
“Okay,” Kristen said.
Laurel had gone with Paul to Diamond Island to drop him off at work, claiming that she had forgotten something at the house that she wanted to get and bring back for James. Kristen suspected Laurel simply wanted a few hours to herself, as she was quite introverted and might not survive at the holiday house with everyone for the next three weeks.
Kristen knew the feeling, but she took a long walk every day, and she’d decided that she could do that with others or alone. And, of course, she had a private room where she could always escape. Even the normal-sized bedrooms had enormous king beds, and hers had a canopy with stars and constellations stuck in the upper drape that went over her head.
The library ceiling had been painted black, like her bedroom ceiling. Since Kristen had arrived early on Friday, she’d been able to check out a few of the rooms that she wasn’t staying in. They had all been decorated and painted differently, and yet all matched the astronomical theme of The Starlight Manor.
She helped Dave put out the signs for each kit, while Tessa started unbagging the things Paul and Laurel had brought. There wasn’t much work to be done today, and they finished in only a few minutes.
Kristen wandered over to one of the bookcases as her daughter and daughter-in-law entered the library. Jean and Clara exclaimed over the beautiful interior, but seeing so many books in one place simply reminded Kristen of Joel.
He had packed their tiny bungalow, where they’d lived near the lighthouse, with as many books, journals, notebooks, and papers as possible. She’d had quite the time going through it all after his death, and the memories streaming through her mind were bittersweet. His death and the subsequent cleanup of the bungalow had brought her girls back to her, but it had also revealed things Kristen would have rather never known.
To simply get out of her head, Kristen selected the book her fingers were touching and pulled it out of the case to find a handsome brown leather cover with gold lettering stamped into it. Just her luck that she would pull out A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
She’d never liked this book, and the last time she had tried to read it, she’d hadn’t finished. Still, she’d never seen this edition, and she wondered if it had been professionally recovered for whoever had owned this house.
She couldn’t even imagine what it had cost to build a house like this, and she had no idea such things existed in her small island town of Five Island Cove. Her life had been so simple on Diamond Island, with a two-bedroom bungalow and the lighthouse to occupy the entirety of her days.
She opened the cover of the book and found an inscription written in the fancy cursive of the eighteenth century.
“For my darling Everleigh,” she whispered aloud. Her fingers automatically went to trace the inked letters. Something old and powerful filled her heart simply by holding this book with its very human writing from long ago.
It almost felt like the book held the spirit of the person who’d written in it, and Kristen instinctively wanted to know more about them. She wanted to know who’d bought the book, how it had come to be covered this way, and who Everleigh was.
She took the book over to a wingback chair and sat down. She wouldn’t read it, but she did turn the pages, her mind revolving around the people who had lived here. Had this house always been a rental, or had a family actually lived within these walls? Had they had servants? Had they abandoned the home or sold it? And if so, why?
She wanted to know everything she could about the house. She looked up as the light changed, expecting to see clouds covering the sun, but the bright blue winter sky winked at her from beyond the glass—no clouds in sight.
Her heartbeat picked up as the filmy drapes in front of her billowed. She searched for an air duct or perhaps a window that had been opened but found none.
And yet the drape moved.
The heavier one, the one that blocked the sun and preserved the books from light damage, didn’t move at all.
She glanced around and found Jean and Clara sitting at the table playing a card game. Tessa and Dave had likewise found books and had curled together on a couch, quietly talking and laughing as they looked through them.
No one had walked by. No one had caused a current that should have made that drape move, and yet it did.
“Mom,” Clara called, and Kristen’s attention got diverted away from the anomaly in front of her. Clara held up her cards. “Do you want to play?”
“Sure.” Kristen set aside the book, pushed herself out of the chair, and went to play cards with her loved ones. When she’d settled down, she looked back over to the window where she’d been. The drape stayed utterly still, and Kristen had no idea what to make of it.
“Do you know who owned this house?” she asked Clara.
“No idea,” Clara said, shuffling the cards and beginning to deal them.
“Do you think it’s been here a long time?” Kristen asked.
“Reuben and I saw a cornerstone on the pool house,” Jean said. “While we were walking this morning, before he went back to the lighthouse.”
“Oh?” Kristen picked up her cards, pretending not to care as much as she did.
“It had the year 1912 on it,” Jean said. “So it’s been here more than a century.”
“The pool house must be newer than the main house,” Kristen said. “I wonder if that’s the year it was renovated.”
Clara met her eyes, something questioning and alive there. “We used to learn about the old houses in Five Island Cove in school,” she said. “I hated history, so I never paid much attention to it.”
Kristen moved her cards around, organizing them by suit. Jean played first—a four of hearts—and Kristen looked at her cards to decide what to play when it was her turn. A quick glance at the pile told her that trump was clubs, and she returned her attention to her cards.
Nineteen-twelve ran through her mind, and she somehow knew that the main house was older than the pool house, which meant it had been here for perhaps as long as the lighthouse on Diamond Island. Maybe longer. She’d brought her laptop with her, and it charged in her bedroom on her nightstand. When she got a free minute, Kristen would do a little bit of research on The Starlight Manor—when it had been built and who had owned it.
Maybe then she would know why the lights seemed to turn on and off by themselves, and why the curtains drifted when there was no current.