“Mother-”
“Leave both of them,” Flo said, serious as death. “I’m scared for you, Andie.”
“Well, stop it,” Andie said, and got in the car. Then she got out again and hugged Flo, who hugged her back, hard. “Sorry, Mom. I love you much. Don’t worry. In a month, I’ll be back and living here in town and you can run the cards for me every day if you like.”
“You don’t understand,” Flo said. “You’re not a mother. When you have a child, you can’t let her go into danger, you have to be there for her-”
“Flo, I’m thirty-four. The child part is over.”
“It’s never over,” Flo said, and Andie shook her head at her obtuseness and got back in her car.
“I’ll call you while I’m there,” she said, and put the Mustang in gear, and then waved at her mother in her rearview mirror as she drove away.
Sea goat, she thought.
A little Flo went a long way.
Andie headed south on I-71 and then turned off onto a winding two-lane highway and then from there onto another narrower road that moved into a heavily wooded area, making the drive dark in the middle of the day. The general air of desolation was not helped by the fact that she saw only two other cars once she passed the last sign of civilization-a shopping center-before she hit New Essex, the depressed little town that marked the turnoff to the long dead-end road the house was supposed to be on. By then the sun was going down, so fifteen miles later, when she saw the battered sign that said ARCHER HOUSE in the middle of some weeds, she pulled off to the side of the road in the deepening twilight and got out to investigate.
There had been a drive next to the sign, but it seemed to have collapsed. What was left was a steep slope, not anything she’d want to drive down if she had a choice.
She got back in the car and drove slowly over the edge, her wheels crunching on sparse gravel.
The road dipped down sharply, scraping the Mustang’s front fender, which made her shudder, and then leveled off into the pothole-laced lane that wound through the trees for about a quarter of a mile and came out into meadow gone to seed. Beyond that an ancient three-story stone house rose up, flaunting two rose windows, a crumbling tower, and a moat, all its windows dark in the twilight and beyond that more clustered trees over which crows circled and cawed. “The House of Archer,” Andie said to herself as she slowed to take it all in. Well, it was a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year.
She followed the drive around to the side where a little bridge crossed the moat onto an untended stretch of pavement that split, the right going to the front of the house and its weathered, stone-arched entrance and the left to the back and a large, weedy flagstoned yard beside a row of garages that had probably once been stables.
She pulled the Mustang up in front of the garages and got out, looking around the deserted yard as she slammed the door, the sound echoing in the gloom. The place wasn’t just neglected, it was slovenly: weeds everywhere, the flagstone broken, the steps to the back door crumbling. The house was plainer in back, with just a single column of porch topped by bay windows, one to each floor, the window frames peeling and the gutters rusting, and everything oppressed by the bleak gray stone.
And all of it was really wrong. North wouldn’t leave property looking like this. Not for two years. And he’d have made sure there was somebody there to greet her when she pulled up.
She shook her head and got one of her suitcases and headed for the house, now really wary of what she was going to find. She pushed the back door open, banging the case on the frame, and then went through a small mudroom and into a big, cold, gloomy, sitting room filled with heavily carved Victorian furniture including an ornate couch covered in green-striped silk, green-striped bolsters against each arm, and several side chairs covered in threadbare needlepoint.
She opened a side door into another cold room, this one all mahogany and brass, with a long, heavy dining table surrounded by equally heavy, ornate chairs.
There was another door in the opposite wall, and she opened that one, feeling more and more like Alice through the Looking Glass, but this time, light hit her as she walked in. It was a huge, white kitchen, but a less welcoming heart-of-the-house would be hard to imagine, nothing like the kitchen full of color North had given her in Columbus. Every surface was scrubbed and empty except for the long wood farmhouse table in the center.
A boy sat at the end, all shoulder blades and elbows, hunched over a bowl of something orange, his brown hair falling into his eyes as he looked up at her from under his thick lashes, his mouth set in a tight, hard line. Sitting close to him was a thin little girl cupping her hands around her own bowl of orange, her pale gray-blue eyes narrowed under her long, tangled white-blond hair, her T-shirt almost covered by all the stuff she had strung around her neck: an old strand of discolored purplish plastic pearls, an ancient locket on a pink ribbon, a string of tiny blue shells, a blue Walkman on a black cord, and a glittery bat on a black chain.
Wonderful, Andie thought, and said, “Hi.”
Two
“You’re late,” a voice snapped from behind Andie, and she turned and saw a plump, overly powdered, elderly woman, her pale, watery, protruding eyes hostile under her improbably red-orange updo, her large white arms folded.
“Yes,” Andie said, putting her suitcase down on the floor. “You must be Mrs. Crumb. I’m-”
“Andromeda Miller. Mr. Archer told me.” Mrs. Crumb nodded, her arms folded over the aggressively flowered apron that covered her equally aggressive bosom. “He tells me everything. He trusts me like I was his own mother.”
The enormity of the lies in that short speech left Andie stunned, not just at the thought of North telling the old lady everything-North didn’t tell anybody everything-but also at him somehow collating Lydia and Mrs. Crumb.
“I know what’s best, so you do as I say, and we’ll all get along fine.” She smiled at Andie, but her eyes were cold. “That’s Carter,” she went on, jerking her head toward the boy without looking at him, “and that’s Alice, and they’re your students. Everything else, I take care of.” She transferred her reptile smile to the little girl. “I’m the one who stays with the little lambs. They know I’m the one they can count on.”
The girl ignored her, but the boy looked back at her, his eyes like stone.
If that kid is a lamb, the wolves are toast, Andie thought.
“So now that you understand how things work,” Mrs. Crumb went on, “I’ll take you to your room.” She took a step closer and Andie caught a whiff of peppermint and booze. “But don’t you get any ideas about me working for you.”
Andie looked at her, exasperated. She might just be feeling threatened-
Mrs. Crumb made a short nod toward Andie’s suitcase. “You’ll have to carry that. I’m not your servant. And I’ll be needing some help around the house, so don’t think you’re too good to pick up a broom.” She sniffed. “I know your kind.”
“I’m afraid there’s been a mistake,” Andie said, stepping on her temper. “I’m not a nanny. And for the next month, I’m the one in charge.”
“Oh?” Mrs. Crumb smiled again, false pity in the tilt of her head. “Mr. Archer put somebody he doesn’t even know over me?” She chuckled without humor. “I don’t think so. You’ll do as I say or I’ll tell Mr. Archer. And then we’ll just see what happens.”
The little girl continued scooping orange whatever, but the boy was watching now.
“Miller is my professional name,” Andie said. “My married name is Archer.”
Mrs. Crumb’s smile froze in place.
Andie shoved her ringless left hand in her coat pocket. “Mrs. North Archer. My husband sent me here for a month to fix whatever’s wrong.” She walked over to the table and looked into the bowls, since meeting Mrs. Crumb’s eyes after that lie was not easy. “After we make our assessment, we’ll decide on the children’s future.”