Chapter Four
Sonya plowed through the week, juggling work projects, taking virtual meetings, and completing a mood board for the additional Ryder project.
She stood studying it when Cleo came upstairs.
“I just checked the Friday spaghetti sauce I’ve got simmering. I got enough going it’ll do for lunch tomorrow if—”
She caught sight of the board. “Well, you work fast.”
“They need the basic pose ideas to get the wardrobe. Mood and activity matter as much as sizes.”
“You’ve got this guy decked out in ski gear, skis included, and a crapload of snow.”
“They want some winter sports shots. They’re doing a model search and hiring a photographer. One of the Ryders has a chalet in Switzerland, so skiing, sledding, snowman building, and so on. And they want my input.”
“First, they really respect your work and your brain. Second, they’re seriously going all out.”
“They do, and they are.”
“And this would be me at the tiller of a small sailboat, and again, doing yoga in a garden.”
“It would.”
“I approve.”
“Good, so did the powers that be.”
It would work, Sonya thought. It would not just slide right into the campaign already begun but boost it up.
“They should finalize wardrobe next week, and ship it. Here. Corrine and I will sort through. Meanwhile, I’m shutting down early. I’m going up to the attic, start that full-house search at the top.”
“Give me a half hour and I’ll pitch in. While we’re searching, we can find what we’d like to set up the guest office.”
“Already there—thinking-wise.” She smiled when she heard the sound of a ball bouncing down in the main hall, and Yoda’s scramble after it. “And it looks like Yoda’s occupied, thanks to Jack. I’m going to grab some sticky notes. I can slap one on pieces and places I’ve been through.”
“That’s an organized and efficient plan, as usual. I’ve got some bankers boxes in the studio. We can put a couple together just in case.”
Sonya got her sticky notes, a pen. They walked up to the third floor together, and Sonya paused on the landing to look past Cleo’s studio to the Gold Room.
“She’s been quiet since the big bad wolf.”
“In there spinning her webs,” Cleo muttered. “Like the toxic spider she is. Hardly any banging around in there the last day or two. All right then, about a half hour.”
While Cleo walked down to her studio, Sonya continued up to the attic.
Daunting was her first thought when she scanned the large and crowded area. And hadn’t she put off really dealing with it for that very reason?
“Pick something,” she told herself. “Start.”
She chose what she thought Cleo would call a chifforobe. And a huge piece Owen would, no doubt, identify by period and type of wood.
She opened the doors first. And found absolutely nothing.
One side had a series of drawers. All empty. As were the two larger drawers at the bottom.
She closed the drawers, put a sticky note on one of the doors.
Still, maybe she’d move the piece down to one of the bedrooms. Once the house was fully hers—with no Hester Dobbs looming.
“It makes a statement.”
She moved on. Nightstands, a small dresser, an elegant little slant-top desk.
She backtracked, and instead of just leaving the notes, wrote possible destinations for each piece.
She started to move through to the trunks for a change of pace, then pulled off one more dustcover.
Another desk. Handsome, she thought, and just a little feminine with the way it curved. Drawers in both sides, one in the middle. She’d need Owen for the type of wood, but it had a kind of brindle finish to her eye.
Like Yoda.
She opened a drawer, and to her surprise found a box of stationery. The pale pink pages had a flowing script header.
Miss Lisbeth Anne Poole
“Lissy,” she whispered. “This was your desk. You sat here, right here, writing letters. And surely dreaming of your wedding day.”
Sonya lifted out the stationery, set it on top of the desk, opened another drawer.
“Oh! They never cleaned it out. Owen and Moira. Couldn’t bear it, I guess.”
She found notepaper where Lisbeth had drawn hearts with her name and Edward’s inside. With their initials inside. Where she’d practiced writing Mrs. Edward Whitmore, Lisbeth Poole Whitmore in perfect cursive.
She found hairpins and clips, pencils, a fountain pen and a bottle of ink. A small box holding theater stubs, playbills, a pretty pink stone.
Then the photographs. A framed one of Lisbeth and the young man Sonya recognized as Edward in a tarnished silver frame. One of Lisbeth with her parents, one with friends—Sonya recognized the woman who’d been in the music room the night she’d seen them. The woman in the blue dress.
“We’ll keep your things, Lissy. We’ll polish the picture frame and set it out. And we’ll use the desk. It’s going in the guest office.”
She noted it on the sticky note, started to move on.
One of the dustcovers slid to the floor.
“I see. Thanks.” She wound her way to the chair, one with that same finish and an inlaid fabric pad with pastel pink and blue flowers.
“It’s perfect, of course it is. This is her desk chair.”
As she ran a hand over its back, she felt the pull.
And saw she now stood in front of the mirror. The glass blurred with color, and she heard music. Something tinny and far, far away.
“Now? Here?” She looked back, wishing for Cleo, but the pull proved too strong.
“All right, all right. I want answers, so…”
She took a breath; she stepped through the glass.
Someone sang about hearing a nightingale’s song.
Sonya felt dizzy, out of place, everything stayed blurred, but the voice singing: I’ll be warbling love’s old sweet tune.
Then she heard a voice, young, bright, join the other.
In the valley of the moon.
And her vision cleared.
Not the attic, but the desk and the chair. And Lisbeth Anne Poole. Lissy singing along with a record on a small Victrola as she filled her fountain pen with ink.
She wore a green dress—it might have been velvet. Long sleeves, a nipped-in waist. Her hair, tied loosely with a green ribbon, spilled down her back as she sat at the desk in a bedroom with wallpaper of big, rosy pink flowers that faced the gardens and the woods.
But snow fell, thick and steady, beyond the windows, and a fire crackled cheerfully in the hearth.
Stepping closer, Sonya caught her scent—young, sweet, floral—as Lisbeth began to write.
Dearest Dina,
You won’t believe it! I hardly believe it myself.
I’m engaged!
Edward took me on an afternoon sleigh ride. It’s snowing to beat the band here, and we had such a time with the horses prancing, their bells jingling! Everything was so white and pretty.
Then he stopped, and he took my hands, and he kissed them both.
Oh, Dina, my heart just flew!
He said he loved me, that I had his heart in my hands. He promised to love me to his last breath and beyond.
Can you imagine?
Then he took the ring out of his pocket—oh, it’s a pip, Dina—and he said: Marry me, please, Lissy. I think I’ll die if you won’t.
I was laughing and crying and pulling off my glove.
Yes, yes, yes! I don’t know how many times I said yes, but I couldn’t stop. At least I couldn’t until he kissed me.
With the snow falling all around us, he kissed me. Oh, my heart, Dina, my heart!
I love him so very much.
Edward had already gotten Papa’s permission, of course. When we got home, Mama and Papa had champagne waiting to toast us. They love Edward, too. I am the luckiest girl in the world!
They’re going to throw us an engagement bash of bashes here at the manor. You must come. Say you’ll be in my wedding party, won’t you? Oh, I don’t know how I’ll wait to be Edward’s bride.
Do come for the party, Dina, my dearest friend, and stay a few days at least.
The party’s in three weeks, and you must come! Write back soon.
Your happy friend and bride-to-be,
Lissy
Taking an envelope, she wrote out a name, an address, and humming to herself, folded the letter into it.
Smiling, she held up her left hand to admire the sparkle of her engagement ring.
“Oh, Edward.” She sighed and pressed her right hand to her heart. “We’ll be so happy, forever and ever.”
Then she shifted in her chair, looked around, looked at Sonya.
“Who’s there? Is someone there?”
And shivering, she rubbed her arms as if chilled.
She doesn’t see me, Sonya realized—not like the night in the music room. But she senses me, feels me.
And something else.
Something cold, something dark, like a shadow suddenly blanketing the room.
Dobbs, somehow here, watching, Sonya thought, as she, too, watched.
“You can’t scare me today! Not one bit.”
But she got up quickly and, taking the letter, hurried from the room.
The shadow stayed, and the cold with it. Then seemed to drift out the door.
Sonya stepped over, laid a hand on the desk.
Then she turned and went back through the mirror.
Everything tilted and went gray.
Arms grabbed her, pulled her in.
“Sonya, oh God. You weren’t here, but the mirror was. You’re cold, and Jesus, so pale.”
“I’m okay, almost. Need to sit.”
She braced a hand on the chair, sat. And Cleo knelt in front of her.
“It wasn’t like it’s been before, exactly. It didn’t take me here. I mean, I didn’t go back and stay in the attic. Maybe that’s why I feel more off.”
“Let me help you downstairs. You can lie down. I’ll get you some water.”
“No, no, it’s passing. It was the desk, this chair. I went where they were. They were Lissy’s. I went to Lissy’s room. Deep pink flowered wallpaper, windows facing the garden. Her room.”
“You can tell me, but let’s go downstairs anyway. Your color’s better. I bet you could use some air.”
“Yeah, I could.”
She got up, but didn’t mind the support of Cleo’s arm around her waist.
“I took longer than I thought,” Cleo began, “then I went down to stir the sauce again, let the pets out. When I came up, I saw the mirror, and I knew you’d gone through.”
“I can’t stop myself.”
“I know.”
“I saw Lissy. She was writing a letter to a friend. The same stationery I found in the desk. She’d just gotten engaged. She was so happy.