Chapter Five
Kelly Barrow checks her watch—not the Rolex her first ex-husband gave her on their first and last wedding anniversary, but her late father’s TAG Heuer Chronograph.
It’s too big, even with several stainless-steel links removed, and the face doesn’t quite match the blue of her eyes as it did his, but she likes to feel close to him.
Especially when she’s dealing with her mother’s failing health.
The neurologist is running late, as usual.
They arrived forty minutes early for a three thirty appointment, and it’s past four now.
The crowded waiting room is close and stuffy.
Her makeup is sweat smudged, and her linen shift is damp and rumpled.
She’s queasy, thanks to the doxycycline she took on an empty stomach because she didn’t have time for breakfast or lunch.
Her mother, seated beside her, is reminiscing about the day she was born.
She does that a lot lately, recounting old memories as the recent ones grow more elusive.
Kelly is well aware that it’s the disease, but sometimes, it wears on her—the constant questioning, the repetitive stories, the light in her mother’s eyes flicking on and off like an electrical short.
Every time they come here, Kelly drills the neurologist. He always says there’s not much, if anything, that can be done to slow the progression, but she’s holding out for a magic bullet.
All around them, other patients and their caregivers flip through magazines, scroll their phones, or are engaged in quiet conversations of their own.
Directly across from Kelly, a pleasant-faced woman about her own age, mid-forties, is accompanied by an elderly man wearing hearing aids, jeans with suspenders, and a blue-and-gold navy veteran hat.
“That dentist had better hurry up,” he tells her, holding up his left wrist and tapping his watch with his right forefinger.
“Dad, this isn’t the dentist. We’re here to see the neurologist. And your appointment isn’t for another twenty minutes. I told you we didn’t have to leave so early.”
“Early? It’s almost time for lunch.”
“No, Dad, we already had lunch.”
“What?” He cups a hand to his ear.
“Never mind. It’s not important. It’s almost your turn.” She goes back to her magazine.
Kelly wishes she could do the same as Beverly’s monologue continues.
She told the same story in the car, twice.
The fifty-mile drive to Albany took twice as long as it should have, and the ride home will likely be even more painstaking, with so many weekenders getting a head start on this last summer getaway.
“. . . and we were going to call you Frankie because Daddy wanted to name you after his father and because he really wanted a son,” her mother goes on, unfiltered as always these days.
“But I was the one who went through forty-seven hours of labor, not Daddy. You were a beautiful blue-eyed princess, so I decided to name you after one. I always loved Princess Grace of Monaco. But Daddy thought Grace sounded like an old lady. Before Princess Grace married Prince Rainier, she was an American actress named Grace Kelly, so you were Kelly. Princess Kelly Barrow of Mulberry Bay. But Princess Grace died on September 14, 1982. That was just, let’s see, just four months before your second birthday. ”
“Mm-hmm,” Kelly agrees, lamenting the injustice—Bev’s long-term memory, sharp and rife with impractical details as the disease ravages the short term.
There are moments when Kelly believes it would be easier if Beverly were too far gone to remember anything at all.
Moments when she asks where her husband is, as if he’s at the office or running an errand.
At first, Kelly broke the news of his death all over again and comforted her mother as she grieved anew.
Now she goes along with the office or the errand because Beverly will soon forget the answer and the question.
The woman seated across from them says, “Excuse me, did you say Kelly Barrow? Mulberry Bay?”
“I’m Beverly Barrow of Mulberry Bay,” Mom informs her, looking pleased at the acknowledgment, or perhaps just that she knows her own name and hometown, which isn’t always the case.
The woman holds up the magazine she’s been reading. It’s the July issue of Hudson Valley Home. An attractive blue-eyed blonde beams from the glossy cover, above the caption Can Kelly Barrow Reverse the Haven Cliff Curse?
“Is this you?” she asks Kelly.
“That’s me.”
Though maybe she should say, That was me.
The woman on the cover is fresh from the salon, chic in Hermès cashmere, flashing a carefree smile.
She was photographed and interviewed for the piece last winter, back when she was still contentedly reconstructing the long-abandoned mansion from its ruins. And yes, when she was still optimistic about reversing the so-called curse that’s dogged the woodland property since an 1894 double homicide.
But now?
Yeah, no. Not so much.
Eight months later, she’s sweaty and disheveled, her hair pulled back in a basic ponytail with a coated rubber band. She’s recovering from a summer of debilitating illness.
At the onset, terrified that a few of her symptoms mimicked her mother’s dementia, she submitted her DNA to one of those online genealogical sites that tests for hereditary markers.
She was relieved when the doctor diagnosed Lyme disease, and even more so when the DNA results revealed that she hadn’t inherited anything more troubling than ties to a couple of unsavory ancestors.
She musters a smile for the woman clutching Hudson Valley Home with her old self plastered on the cover, wishing there was a polite way to extract herself from the conversation.
“Wow! I can’t believe this. I mean, I’m sitting here flipping pages and there you are in the magazine, and here you are in person. What are the odds?”
Kelly points to the low table between them, where an issue of People shows Jennifer Lopez on the cover. “I mean . . . I wouldn’t expect JLo to walk through the door, but hey, you never know, right?”
The woman returns her smile. “It’s amazing what you’ve done to the house. The article says you’ve re-created the interior to exactly how it was in the eighteen hundreds?”
“Well, I didn’t do it all by myself. My decorator, Linden, is a genius. He used old photographs we found in the historical society archives. It’s almost identical to what it looked like when the Winterfields lived there.”
“Did the property come with their original furniture too?”
“No, but I’ve tracked down a lot of it.”
The property did come with the Winterfields’ great-great-granddaughter Caroline’s remains, unearthed in June by Kelly’s pool excavators.
“Have you always been interested in renovating old houses?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Then why this one?”
She seems like a nice person. Kelly, who isn’t always, doesn’t feel like making small talk with strangers. Especially not in a place like this, when people around them can hear every word they say.
Or not.
The old man nudges his daughter, pointing again at his watch and shouting, “They’re late.”
“No, Dad, you’re early. And guess what?” She points at the magazine cover, then at Kelly. “This is her!”
“She’s the dentist?”
“No! She’s Kelly Barrow. She’s renovating the old Winterfield place in Mulberry Bay.”
He lights with recognition. “Mulberry Bay! I’m from Mulberry Bay. George Hamlin. This is my daughter, Cindi with an i.” He shakes Kelly’s hand, then her mother’s.
Beverly turns to Kelly. “Who are these people?”
“This is George, Mom. He just said. And this is Cindi with an i.”
“Do you know the Winterfields?” George asks Kelly.
Now there’s a loaded question.
Kelly says, “I know their house. Since, you know, I own it.”
“Which house is that?” Beverly asks her.
“Haven Cliff, Mom.”
“Oh yes. The insane asylum.”
“That was when I was a boy,” George tells her. “Now it’s abandoned.”
“No, now it’s a beautiful home again, see?” Cindi folds back the magazine to show her father, then Beverly.
The first photo is a vintage sepia shot of a pillared granite mansion set on a wooded bluff above Mulberry Lake, with the Catskills rising in the distance. There’s a horse and buggy at the hitching post out front, beside an elaborate garden with a splash-blurred marble fountain.
The second image is equally monochromatic. It’s of the same house, but framed by bare branches, its twin turrets rising against a milky winter sky and misty mountain peaks. No horse, buggy, or hitching post—just snow blanketing the wide stone terrace and dusting the frozen fountain.
Before-and-after shots, snapped 130 years apart.
Images from the in-between years would have shown the same building as a tuberculosis sanatorium in the early nineteen hundreds and then, yes, a so-called “lunatic asylum” through the eighties.
After that, the mansion was abandoned to crumbling ruins until Kelly bought it three years ago.
Beverly examines the photos intently, as if she’s been asked to identify a suspect in a lineup.
“My grandfather did some of the masonry at Haven Cliff,” George comments. “He said that pretentious New York City tycoon built the damned thing right on top of an old burial ground. He didn’t care. Just went ahead and did what he felt like doing. And now look.”
“Dad—”
“Cindi, you know that’s how these people are.”
“Pretentious New York City tycoons?” Kelly asks.
“Filthy-rich summer people. They show up and think they can take over. Throw their money around and get whatever they want.”
“Dad! Sorry, Kelly. He’s not talking about you. You’re not, uh . . .”
Oh, hell yes, she is filthy rich, thanks to a pair of ex-husbands.
She says, “No, I’m definitely not a summer person. I grew up in Mulberry Bay, just like you, George.”
“See that, Dad? Kelly, I think it’s great that you never left your hometown.”
Kelly sees no reason to correct her or admit that when she was growing up, Mulberry Bay was a bleak, dying town.
“I can’t wait to escape this wasteland,” she remembers grumbling to anyone who’d listen.
Her friend Caroline was a great listener. “If all the good people leave, it’s only going to get worse.”
“No one ever called me a good person.”
Caroline, who always saw the best in people, said, “Well, you are, deep down inside. And you should stay forever, like me.”
“Forever? Why?”
“Because I’m going to make it better. And because it’s home.”
Oh, Caroline. You never got that chance.
Kelly shoots a glance at the door to the examination area, wishing the nurse would summon her mother.
“I can’t believe anyone would buy Haven Cliff after everything that’s happened to that family,” George says. “Not unless . . . Have you heard about the lost treasure?”
Ah, the treasure. According to legend, a robbery at the Winterfields’ New York City mansion was instrumental in their decision to build a summer estate in a remote location.
Reportedly, they installed a hidden vault somewhere in the rocky, wooded terrain surrounding Haven Cliff and tucked away their remaining valuables.
Long before Kelly and her friends started partying up there as teenagers, they’d traipsed around the ruins looking for the treasure, as had every other kid who grew up in Mulberry Bay.
Still, she feigns ignorance, in case old George knows something she doesn’t. “Wow, there’s a lost treasure?”
He nods. “Asa Winterfield didn’t trust the locals.”
“Maybe because the locals didn’t trust him? They can be awfully insular.”
“The Winterfields?”
“The locals.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that. So Asa built a secret vault somewhere in the woods up there for their jewels, artwork, silver, cash, you name it.”
“Gold doubloons? Cryptocurrency?”
His daughter snickers.
A door opens behind the reception desk, and a scrubs-clad man appears with a clipboard. “Beverly? Beverly Farrow?”
“Right here!” Kelly touches her mother’s arm, so scrawny beneath the long-sleeved hoodie she insisted on wearing this morning despite the heat wave. “Come on.”
She shakes her head, rooted on the brown vinyl sofa. “He said Beverly Farrow. I’m Beverly Barrow.”
“He means you.”
“Farrow? I think I know my own name!” She’s indignant.
Maybe it’s the disease. Maybe she’s just in the mood to be difficult.
With a sigh, Kelly walks over to the nurse and says in a low voice, “My mom’s a little confused. Would you mind calling her again, please? And the name is actually Barrow.”
“So sorry.” He peers at the clipboard and nods. “Beverly? Beverly Barrow? We’re ready for you now.”
Her mother heads for the door like an Academy Award winner sailing to the stage.
Aware that it will be at least another twenty minutes before the doctor comes in, Kelly tells the nurse she’ll join them then.
Avoiding eye contact with George and Cindi-With-An-I, she exits the suffocating waiting room, and then the building.
So much for fresh air. The outside world is glaring sun and steamy asphalt.
She sits on a bench and checks her phone.
No new messages on the group thread with Midge and Talia, but Linden has responded to her earlier text asking whether the cleaning service left the house spotless and the catering team is there preparing the evening meal. Yes, and yes.
He’s been at Haven Cliff all day, putting the finishing touches on a welcoming space for Talia’s little boy, who suffers from separation anxiety and won’t want to be far from his parents in a strange house.
After consulting with Talia on the details, Kelly directed Linden to transform the largest guest suite’s windowed walk-in closet into a cozy bedroom similar to Caleb’s own.
Linden sent a few photos of the end result.
You’ve outdone yourself! Kelly texts back. Can you stick around for dinner?
He responds with a GIF of a bosomy, Botoxed woman—undoubtedly one of the Real Housewives stars—lifting a glass above a “Woo-hoo” chyron.
Kelly grins and writes: See you soon!
She’s sure the others won’t mind having Linden join them.
He’s witty and interesting and can always be counted on to keep the conversation going.
That will relieve a bit of hostess pressure from Kelly, who isn’t sure how much Talia’s husband knows about her past in Mulberry Bay.
Linden, who wasn’t a part of it, either, will keep the focus on other topics.
As this long, terrible summer draws to a close, Kelly wishes she could put everything behind her, move on, truly begin to heal.
It’s just . . .
For weeks now, she’s been going over the facts they’ve pieced together about Caroline’s last days, and the secrets she’d confided in them. They just don’t add up. Something is off.
She hasn’t mentioned that to Midge, because Midge is a cop. She has to follow the law.
Kelly isn’t bound by such restrictions.
Scrolling down on her phone, she sees a text from Toby, the private investigator she hired to do some sniffing around into Caroline’s past, and her family’s.
Found some new information. Call me when you can talk.