October 15, 2014

Blue Peacock Manor

"God, Mom, you've got to be kidding!" Jade said from the passenger seat of the Explorer as Sarah drove along the once-gravel lane.

"Not kidding," Sarah responded. "You know that." Winding through thick stands of pine, fir, and cedar, the twin ruts were weed-choked and filled with potholes that had become puddles with the recent rain.

"You can't actually think that we can live here!" Catching glimpses of the huge house through the trees, Jade, seventeen, was clearly horrified and, as usual, wasn't afraid to voice her opinion.

"Mom's serious," Gracie said from the backseat, where she was crammed between piles of blankets, and mounds of comforters, sleeping bags, and the other bedding they were moving from Vancouver. "She told us."

Jade shot a glance over her shoulder. "I know. But it's worse than I thought."

"That's impossible," Gracie said.

"No one asked your opinion!"

Sarah's hands tightened over the steering wheel. She'd already heard how she was ruining her kids' lives by packing them up and returning to the old homestead where she'd been born and raised. To hear them tell it, she was the worst mother in the world. The word "hate" had been thrown around, aimed at her, the move, and their miserable lives in general.

Single motherhood. It wasn't for the faint-hearted, she'd decided long ago. So her kids were still angry with her. Too bad. Sarah needed a fresh start.

And though Jade and Gracie didn't know it, they did too.

"It's like we're in another solar system," Jade said as the thickets of trees gave way to a wide clearing high above the Columbia River.

Gracie agreed, "In a land, far, far away."

"Oh, stop it. It's not that bad," Sarah said. Her girls had lived most of their lives in Vancouver, Washington, right across the river from Portland, Oregon. Theirs had been a city life. Out here, in Stewart's Crossing, things would be different, and even more so at Sarah's childhood home of Blue Peacock Manor.

Perched high on the cliffs overlooking the Columbia River, the massive house where Sarah had been raised rose in three stories of cedar and stone. Built in the Queen Anne style of a Victorian home, its gables and chimneys knifed upward into a somber gray sky, and from her vantage point Sarah could now see the glass cupola that opened onto the widow's walk. For a second, she felt a frisson of dread slide down her spine, but she pushed it aside.

"Oh. My. God." Jade's jaw dropped open as she stared at the house. "It looks like something straight out of The Addams Family."

"Let me see!" In the backseat, Gracie unhooked her seat belt and leaned forward for a better view. "She's right." For once Gracie agreed with her older sister.

"Oh, come on," Sarah said, but Jade's opinion wasn't that far off. With a broad, sagging porch and crumbling chimneys, the once-grand house that in the past the locals had called the Jewel of the Columbia was in worse shape than she remembered.

"Are you blind? This place is a disaster!" Jade was staring through the windshield and slowly shaking her head, as if she couldn't believe the horrid turn her life had just taken. Driving closer to the garage, they passed another building that was falling into total disrepair. "Mom. Seriously. We can't live here." She turned her wide, mascara-laden eyes on her mother as if Sarah had gone completely out of her mind.

"We can and we will. Eventually." Sarah cranked on the wheel to swing the car around and parked near the walkway leading to the entrance of the main house. The decorative rusted gate was falling off its hinges, the arbor long gone, the roses flanking the flagstone path leggy and gone to seed. "We're going to camp out in the main house until the work on the guesthouse is finished, probably next week. That's where we'll hang out until the house is done, but that will take ... months, maybe up to a year."

"The guest ... Oh my God, is that it?" Jade pointed a black-tipped nail at the smaller structure located across a wide stone courtyard from its immense counterpart. The guesthouse was in much the same shape as the main house and outbuildings. Shingles were missing, the gutters were rusted, and most of the downspouts were disconnected or missing altogether. Many of the windows were boarded over as well, and the few that remained were cracked and yellowed.

"Charming." Jade let out a disgusted breath. "I can't wait."

"I thought you'd feel that way," Sarah said with a faint smile.

"Funny," Jade mocked.

"Come on. Buck up. It's just for a little while. Eventually we'll move into the main house for good, if we don't sell it."

Gracie said, "You should sell it now!"

"It's not just mine, remember? My brothers and sister own part of it. What we do with it will be a group decision."

"Doesn't anyone have a lighter?" Jade suggested, almost kidding. "You could burn it down and collect the insurance money."

"How do you know about ...?" But she didn't finish the question as she cut the engine. Jade, along with her newfound love of the macabre, was also into every kind of police or detective show that aired on television. Recently she'd discovered true crime as well, the kind of shows in which B-grade actors reenacted grisly murders and the like. Jade's interests, which seemed to coincide with those of her current boyfriend, disturbed Sarah, but she tried to keep from haranguing her daughter about them. In this case, less was more.

"You should sell out your part of it. Leave it to Aunt Dee Linn and Uncle Joe and Jake to renovate," Jade said. "Get out while you can. God, Mom, this is just so nuts that we're here. Not only is this house like something out of a bad horror movie, but it's in the middle of nowhere."

She wasn't that far off. The house and grounds were at least five miles from the nearest town of Stewart's Crossing, the surrounding neighbors' farms hidden by stands of fir and cedar. Sarah cut the engine and glanced toward Willow Creek, the natural divide between this property and the next, which had belonged to the Walsh family for more than a hundred years. For a split second she thought about Clint, the last of the Walsh line, who according to Dee Linn and Aunt Marge, was still living in the homestead. She reminded herself sternly that he was not the reason she'd pushed so hard to move back to Stewart's Crossing.

"Why don't you just take me back to get my car," Jade said as Sarah swung the Explorer around to park near the garage.

"Because it won't be ready for a couple of days, you heard Hal." They'd left Jade's Honda with a mechanic in town; it was scheduled to get a new set of tires and much-needed brakes, and Hal was going to figure out why the Civic was leaking some kind of fluid.

"Oh, right, Hal the master mechanic." Jade was disparaging.

"Best in town," Sarah said, tossing her keys into her bag. "My dad used him."

"Only mechanic in town. And Grandpa's been gone a long time, so it must've been eons ago!"

Sarah actually smiled. "Okay, you got me there. But the place was updated from the last time I was there. Lots of electronic equipment and a couple of new mechanics on staff."

To her amazement, Jade's lips twitched as well, reminding Sarah of the younger, more innocent girl she'd been such a short while ago. "And a lot of customers."

"Must be bad car karma right now," Sarah agreed. There...