The Mansion Read online

  Emily coughed. “Not to be indelicate, Shawn, but if you remember right, I did spend a winter here. Starting on November first, in fact.”

  Billy piped up. “And I was here for two of them. Not sure you have to explain what it’s like here when it snows. Though this winter should be a lot easier. It’s not like our cabin was exactly the lap of luxury.” Billy’s voice was kind, though, and Emily was reminded of how close those two had once been. He continued, “But that does raise an interesting question. How could Eagle Mansion stay in business if it was only in operation half the year?”

  “They raked in enough during the six months it was open,” Shawn said. “At least that’s the story I heard. There are some pictures, too. My great-grandfather wearing an ankle-length mink coat and standing in front of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. Beautiful car. One of those went at auction a few years ago for north of eight million bucks.”

  “Let me guess,” Wendy said, rolling her eyes, “you were the buyer?”

  Shawn sat back in his seat. He had a boyish grin on his face. He looked alive, Emily thought. He turned and winked at her.

  “Oh, don’t go spoiling things,” Shawn said. The words were in response to Wendy, but they were meant for Emily: “Just let me show off a bit.”

  She hated the way it thrilled her. This was what she’d been secretly hoping for. His attention showered on her.

  He continued. “There are a few old ledgers, too. He had a decent amount socked away when the stock market crashed in 1929, and he still had something set aside when he finally wised up and shuttered the place in the early thirties instead of trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. But he made some bad decisions during the war, and after the war he tried to get the mansion going again, but there were all these rumors that it was haunted and then he was murdered and—”

  “Whoa. Whoa,” Emily said. “Murdered? What? How is this the first I’m hearing of it?”

  She glanced over at Billy, who signaled that he’d had no idea either, but when she looked back at Shawn, the eager openness was gone. He looked, if she had to put a word to it, petulant.

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know, Emily.” He pushed his empty plate away from him and then stood up. “Time for us to be off, Wendy. I’ve got an early meeting in Baltimore tomorrow. Let the pilot know I want to be wheels up in half an hour.” He stepped around the table, shook Billy’s uninjured hand, and then moved around to where Emily was sitting. He leaned in and kissed her cheek. But when he did so, he whispered something. She didn’t quite catch it, but it sounded like he said “Shelly’s.”

  She mulled it over a little as she ran up over the rise, the valley spilling in front of her, Eagle Mansion looking alive in the morning light. Nearby, the house caught the sun in its glass steel. What was it he had been trying to whisper to her the night before?

  Shelly’s?

  That didn’t make any sense.

  She lies?

  Ludicrous. Why would he say that to her? She lies? Who lies? Nellie?

  No. She’d just misheard him.

  She looked at her watch. Twenty to eight. She was right on pace. Fifteen more minutes running, a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal while she read the New York Times and stopped sweating, and then she’d see what kind of shower a billionaire built. By nine o’clock she’d be ready to start working on her book. It was going to be fun, and she already had the basic idea: an unfulfilled woman meets a hunky guy who seems dangerous but is really waiting to be tamed. Throw in a few sex scenes, and ta-da! She thought about the book for a few minutes while she ran, trying to decide if her main character should be a librarian or a teacher. And the man should be a single father, she thought, a widower, whose wife has been gone long enough that it’s appropriate for him to move on. Maybe the man could be secretly wealthy. And really, really good in bed, she thought, smiling to herself. She turned in the road and started running back up to the house, picking up her pace as much as she could on the incline. She wanted to get home.

  Romance awaited.

  TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  EVENT HORIZON

  You’re hungry, Billy.

  Billy rubbed his hands over his face and pushed his chair back from the desk. He was hungry, actually. “Thanks,” he said. “What time is it?”

  Eleven thirty. You haven’t had anything to eat since dinner yesterday.

  “Or drink,” he said. “I’m thirsty, too.”

  DO YOU WANT A DRINK?

  He pulled his hands off his face. “What?”

  Do you want a break?

  “Yeah,” he said. “A break is good. I’ll be back, okay?”

  I’m not going anywhere.

  He couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He had two laptops open on the desk, but Nellie was still manifesting as a grass-colored tennis ball on the wall, and he found it made things easier on him; it gave him somewhere to smile at. “Okay. You want to hibernate or whatever while I’m gone?”

  If you wish.

  Not really an answer.

  He walked out the door of the office and made his way down the stairs. His hand was throbbing, and he realized he did want a drink, just to dull things a bit. He’d said no to the painkillers, and it had hurt him a little to see the relief that breezed across Emily’s face when he said he was fine without them. She’d tried to mask it, of course, but it was too obvious. He’d said no because it hadn’t hurt that much at the time and he hadn’t thought he needed them, but part of that had been whatever topical anesthetic Nellie had applied. This morning . . . Wait? Eleven thirty in the morning or eleven thirty at night? How long had he been working without a break? He turned the corner on the stairs and saw daylight through the window. Okay. That was good. Eleven thirty in the morning. What was not good was that his hand was sore. It was too late now to change course and say that he did, in fact, want painkillers.

  Worse than the pain was that the hand itched like a son of a bitch. It felt like ants were in his skin. He actually peeled back the bandages to check and make sure there wasn’t anything crawling under there.

  It was just his pink flesh and a row of neat stitches.

  So no painkillers, but he could have some lunch. That would help. Maybe a coffee or a Diet Coke, too, though he was surprised at how awake he felt. He’d pulled an all-nighter without even realizing it. He should probably grab a nap after he ate, but if he was feeling this good, he’d go back to working on Nellie instead.

  He came into the living area and saw Emily sitting at the dining room table. Her laptop was sitting on the table, open and in front of her but pushed away. Her head was resting on the table. She must have heard his footsteps, because she sat up and gave him a weak smile.

  “You okay, honey?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just struggling a bit.”

  He walked over and stood by her. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to write a book.”

  “Really?” He made a deliberately funny gesture with his face, puffing out his lower lip and raising his eyebrows. The screen on her laptop was dark, but it wasn’t plugged in, so maybe it had just been a few minutes of her sitting like that, with the power saver kicking in. “I didn’t know you wanted to be a writer.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I mean, I sort of do. I don’t want to be writer, per se, but I thought it would be fun to write a book. One of those romance-type books I’m always reading.”

  “Romance or erotica? You always say there’s a real difference.”

  She closed the laptop. “Well, right now I feel like I’m totally screwed, so that goes with erotica, right?”

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that, so he said, “Okay,” and patted her on the shoulder. He turned to walk to the kitchen.

  “Okay?”

  Uh-oh. He turned back. “Um, good?”

  When he’d come into the room and she first looked at him, she’d looked kind of down, but now she looked angry.

  “It’s exciting, I guess?” he
said. “I just didn’t know you wanted to write a book. Very cool. How’s it going so far?”

  “Fine,” she said, but he knew that voice, knew that look.

  “I was going to make some lunch. Nellie pointed out that I was hungry. I forgot to come to bed or eat breakfast. Can I make you something?”

  She rested her hand flat on the closed lid of the computer. “How about we go into town? Try out this Thai place Shawn was bragging about. I mean, Shawn basically bought his own chef, so I’m assuming it’s decent. What’s the point of having a fiefdom if your serfs are just middling? You’ve got to believe it’s better than you’d expect for a Thai place in a town this small. It’s probably solid even by Seattle standards.”

  Billy hesitated. He wanted to go back upstairs and keep working, but he also knew there wasn’t a real hurry. Shawn and his engineers might not be able to figure out why Nellie was acting herky-jerky, but they wouldn’t, would they? That was a little bit like some teenage camp counselor thinking he understood your kid better than you did. Billy had coded most of Nellie in a manic burst of a few months before they gave up and moved on to Eagle Logic, and there was no reason he couldn’t go in and clean up the problems in the same amount of time. Besides, he already thought he had a sense of at least a couple of the pinch points, and it looked like Emily was having a bit of a pinch point herself this morning. He knew that the deeper into the project he got the less he’d be able to surface into the real world, so if there was a time to bank some goodwill in his marriage, this was it. If Emily wanted to go out for lunch, he could go out for lunch.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m still getting used to the idea that we can afford to pop out for a meal whenever we feel like it again. Though, you know we had Thai food two nights ago in Cortaca, right?”

  She just looked at him in that way that made it very clear that had she wanted something other than Thai food she would have said so.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me grab my wallet.”

  He walked back to the bedroom to get money, sparing a glance both on the way there and on the way back for the closed frosted doors to the office. Nellie could wait, he thought. As he shoved his wallet into the pocket of his jeans, he wondered if there was any point to bringing a wallet. If Shawn owned the town and Billy was Shawn’s genius in residence, was he going to have to pay for stuff? Could he just put it on Shawn’s tab? Probably, he thought, but better safe than sorry.

  By the time he got downstairs, the Honda was waiting for them. Had Emily called for it, or had Nellie been able to order it to come around? Could Nellie extend her reach to the whole estate or only Eagle Mansion? He should ask her that later, he thought.

  He and Emily both brought books with them and let the Pilot drive on automatic. God, what a luxury, he thought, and yet it was something he got used to almost immediately. The same thing happened when he’d first gotten a smartphone; the idea of having e-mail and internet and GPS and pretty much everything else in the universe with him at all times had seemed like some sort of wizardry. It was awesome, in the classical definition of the word; it caused an almost fearful wonderment. But like everybody else, after just a few days he got annoyed if he was somewhere with shitty cell coverage or when the battery went dead. The same thing was likely true with self-driving cars. When you first got one it was a life-changer, but pretty soon it just became normal. If he and Emily had kids, their kids wouldn’t know any different. They’d laugh at the idea that you once had to drive your own car. What did you do when you were tired or sick? How did you send the car back to the house when you forgot to bring something with you? What did kids do when they needed a ride somewhere and their parents were busy? Why didn’t anybody care about how many people died every year in car accidents?

  Emily’s book was an actual paperback, not a tablet, featuring a relatively tasteful cover that just showed a cabin in the woods. Some of the books she read were more overtly romance or erotic novels according to the covers, but some masqueraded as serious works. It was funny to him. Why did the publishers bother? The women who read them—he assumed it was mostly women—were looking for some escapism, so what was the point in putting on a cover that promised anything else? He believed in truth in advertising. Though, he conceded, there were probably a lot of women who were embarrassed to read a book with a titillating cover in public. It didn’t seem to bother Emily, which was fine with him. And why should it? Some of the books were shitty, but a great many of them were pretty decent, and a few were truly good, and wasn’t that really the case with most things? They weren’t exactly his preferred reading, but he was more than happy to have Emily read them. He could always tell when she was reading a good one: it was reflected in their sex life.

  As for him, he was reading on his tablet, a relatively obscure text on artificial intelligence: New Event Horizon, by Anna Greenberg. Not that he ever, for a minute, thought of Nellie as belonging in that category, any more than you could claim a smart golden retriever was as intelligent as a human, but there were some real overlaps conceptually in what Nellie did and what Greenberg was positing. A lot of programmers tried to get to artificial intelligence through brute force, coding every conceivable situation into the program, but it was a process that just didn’t work. No matter how much computing power you had, you couldn’t anticipate everything; there were always curveballs. A fixed set of rules wasn’t functional, even if you could program the computer to learn new protocols. You might get something that could pass a Turing Test, but fooling a human didn’t mean artificial intelligence; it just wasn’t that hard to fool a human. People got tricked all the time. Greenberg was more interested in the idea of a program that operated on the basis of probability rather than strict rules, and while what Greenberg put forward wasn’t exactly the same as the way Billy tried to bend logic gates from a strict yes/no into a maybe, her concepts were in spitting distance.

  They sat down at the Thai place and ordered. Thai iced coffee and a panang curry with tofu for Emily, Diet Coke and a pad see ew with beef, the spice tray on the side, for him. It was a cute place, Billy thought, but soulless. Brand-new and lovely, and absolutely lacking in any sort of human touch. It felt like somebody had fed a computer a bunch of photos of Thai restaurants and the computer had synthesized them and spit them back out. Which wasn’t the worst idea in some ways; if you allowed a certain amount of chaos to enter the equation, you could end up with something interesting. It reminded him of an experiment that Google ran a few years back with artificial neural networks and pictures. They directed the software to amplify certain patterns and then created a feedback loop. The result was something startling and strange, pictures that were works of art in themselves. It was an interesting extension of the idea of machine learning. Instead of giving the software pictures and letting it figure out what was in the picture, Google had tasked the software with imagining something new. He supposed that if he had Nellie take—

  “Billy. Are you listening?”

  He looked at Emily. Her book was down and she was looking at him. Their empty plates were sitting in front of them on the table. Evidently the food had come and he had eaten it. He had no memory of any of it passing his lips, no idea if he’d enjoyed it at all, but he no longer felt hungry.

  “Uh, yes?”

  She laughed. “That was the least committed yes I’ve ever heard. I just asked you if you wanted to walk around town a little bit after lunch.”

  “Oh. Do you want an honest answer or do you just want me to say yes?”

  She laughed again, but he hadn’t been joking.

  “No, it’s fine. If you want to go back and keep working, just make sure you send the car back for me.” She reached out to touch his bandages. “How’s the hand? I can’t believe I haven’t asked.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sore. The stitches itch like crazy, though.”

  “That part will get worse before it gets better,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Emily signaled for the check. The waiter, a thin, you
ng bottle-blond woman who looked fourteen but who was probably twice that age, came over.

  “There’s no bill,” she said. She was wearing a name tag. Cheryl.

  “How can there be no bill?”

  “Anything you and Mr. Stafford want while you’re in Whiskey Run is complimentary,” the young woman said.

  Billy wasn’t terribly surprised that there was no charge, but he was surprised that she knew his name.

  The woman blushed a little, but she seemed pretty put together. “Everybody knows who you are. And you, too, ma’am. I don’t know if you know much about the town, but things were hard here before Mr. Eagle came in. He’s done a good thing in Whiskey Run. My oldest, Ricky, is a junior in high school”—Billy revised his age estimate for Cheryl upward; though she still didn’t look old enough to have a kid that age, let alone to have a kid at all, he figured that in a place like this, she might have started young—“and he’ll be going to college thanks to Mr. Eagle. He’s got himself good grades and did well on the PSATs, and he’s looking at NYU. I’m not a fan of him going to New York myself, but I understand why he’s got the itch.”

  At the word itch, Billy felt his hand start to throb.

  “With the money from Mr. Eagle, Ricky can go and get himself whatever kind of education he wants. Scholarships for college for every kid in Whiskey Run.”