Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 127368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127368 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 637(@200wpm)___ 509(@250wpm)___ 425(@300wpm)
Lore had it that Duncroft was possessed of more than one ghost.
Dorothy Clifton, it was said, was the angriest spirit of the lot.
I could tell Lou was warming to my theme when she spoke.
Then again, I suspected she would. She was always trying to get me to cuddle up with popcorn and ice cream and watch things like Get Out and The Shining and It. She loved that kind of thing.
I hated it. That would be hated it, with a passion.
It took a while for me to love her, but eventually I did. I wasn’t as ugly about it in the beginning as Portia, but Dad marrying someone I could be friends with in the manner we were actually contemporaries was not fun.
Then we became friends, and things changed.
“What I don’t understand is, why the secrecy?” she asked. “From what I know, never, not once have they opened the house to the public. By invitation only. And those invitations have been scarce. Every generation, rabid privacy. It’s really unusual in a heritage home in England like Duncroft.”
“I know, right?”
“It’s like they’re hiding something.”
It totally was.
“I guess we’re going to find out,” she noted. “Ten days there, plenty of time to see a ghost.”
“Yes,” I replied. “Plenty of time. Plenty of time to uncover secrets too.”
“Yes,” she whispered, again sounding off, and I almost didn’t hear it when she finished, “Secrets.”
I didn’t push further on that either, though I thought it was weird, regardless of the fact I knew Lou had secrets.
We all did.
I didn’t dig for hers, mostly so she would return the favor.
As for what we were soon to face, I’d caved in watching Get Out and The Shining, because they were classics and I liked films. And I would admit I thought they were both really good. I put my foot down on such as It and The Ring (and others).
But I wasn’t concerned about Duncroft’s supposed ghosts because I didn’t believe in ghosts.
I was an avid member of the National Trust. I’d been in many a manor and castle in that country (and others). The mustiness. The draftiness. The dank darkness or shadowed corners or secret passageways. I could absolutely see how people could convince themselves they’d experienced a haunting.
But that didn’t make it real.
No, I was more worried about the patrician Richard. The withdrawn Jane. The ne’er-do-well Daniel.
The womanizer Ian.
And secrets.
Theirs.
And ours.
Yes, I was more concerned about the Alcotts than about their supposedly haunted country seat.
Them and us…we were not a good mix.
Dad had moved Portia and me to England twenty years ago. Although I went home frequently for visitations with Mom—and so Portia could have some sort of mother figure, I talked Dad into letting her go with me—for all intents and purposes, we’d never left.
We were still proud Americans and the beneficiaries of massive inheritances of new money. My mother, Dad’s first castoff, had been and still was a schoolteacher. Portia’s mother, castoff two, had been an incorrigible gold digger.
And then there was Lou, who was only five years older than me.
This sojourn felt more like Lou and I had been called in as reinforcements for a week in the English countryside at the very famous home of a very wealthy and illustrious family.
But nevertheless, we were still outnumbered.
And if you believed in that kind of thing, outclassed.
In other words, I was feeling some anxiety too.
It didn’t help that we’d left the motorway forty-five minutes ago. We’d then turned off the A road twenty minutes ago, and not onto a B road, but a coiling, thin ribbon of C road. We hadn’t passed a town or village in miles. And according to the satnav, we had another twenty-six minutes on this lane, twisting through…nothing.
This was a long way from anything—and call me a city girl (which I was)—I didn’t like it.
Lou grew quiet along with me.
And we both (for my part, since I was driving, it was intermittently) watched the arrow on the satnav glide along the snaking road as we kept track of the countdown to arrival.
It was 2:37 and we were to arrive at 3:03.
We broke out of the hedgerows at 2:55 and into rolling countryside covered in green, with vast splotches of purple heather and jutting masts of gray, lichen-covered rocks punctuated here and there by an irregular tree malformed by wind.
Add some mist and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a frock-coated Heathcliff brooding astride his horse in the distance.
At 3:00, the moor gave way to a more cultivated and arboreal landscape.
At 3:02, Duncroft House became visible.
And…wow.
Okay.
Maybe Buckingham and Windsor were the biggest, shiniest jewels in England’s crown.
But in my opinion, Duncroft shone brightly as jewel number three.
It was beautiful.
It was huge.
It was sprawling.
And it was overpowering.
“Right. Now I’m nervous,” I admitted.
Lou reached out and squeezed my knee.
I drove my Mercedes between the tall, black, elaborate iron gates accented copiously by gold and attached on either side to a ten-foot-tall wall made of thick Yorkstone.