The Mansion Read online

  Billy thought he heard a sound behind him. The haunting echo of footsteps in a corridor. The ghostly brush of linen. He looked over his shoulder, expecting to see Wendy coming into the room with another Diet Coke for him, or an espresso for Shawn, her skirt making that soft kissing sound. But there was nobody there. Nobody behind him. Shawn’s office was large enough to have easily held a hundred people, but it was just the two of them. Just him and Shawn. Only them. Empty.

  “I didn’t think you wanted to talk about it,” Shawn said. He walked across the thick rug and sat on the other couch so that he was at an angle from Billy. The coffee table was made of metal. Gold-infused titanium, Billy realized. Eagle Titanium. Jesus. It was like Shawn had designed the office as a shrine to himself, Billy thought. Shawn swung his feet up onto the coffee table and laced his hands behind his head. “Besides, that’s not why I brought you here.”

  Suddenly, Billy was tired of it all. He wasn’t angry anymore. Just tired. “Why am I here, Shawn? Can we get it over with so that I can go home to my shitty job and my shitty life and my shitty apartment?”

  “And Emily? So you can get home to Emily, too?”

  Billy hesitated. And Emily. He wasn’t sure where she fell in the scheme of things. He’d known once, but not anymore. He didn’t know where his relationship with Emily stood on the ledger sheet. How far in the red had that balance gone? His marriage was like his credit cards: he’d spent more than he’d ever be able to pay off. He still loved Emily. Immensely. He hated admitting it, even to himself, but he would never have gotten sober if not for her, and the worst thing he could think of was her leaving him. Again. Leaving him again. For good this time. But that was none of Shawn’s business. Billy looked at Shawn squarely and said, with a confidence he didn’t feel, “And Emily, of course. Don’t be a dick.”

  “Up front, I should say this: I’m not over it. I’m still angry about what happened with Emily.”

  “You got Eagle Logic. Things turned out just fine for you. Don’t complain to me about who ended up with Emily.”

  Shawn stared at him. It was probably for only a few seconds, but it felt longer.

  “I want to offer you a job,” Shawn said. He fidgeted and waved his hand a little. “I don’t want to make it sound like something it’s not. I want to be clear that it’s something off the books. But if it works out, it could be really lucrative.”

  “We both know that you couldn’t hire me to work for Eagle Technology, even if you wanted to. Even if I wanted to. I’m radioactive, Shawn. Let’s not pretend we don’t both know it.” And it was true. So many reasons. A sexual harassment lawsuit that was completely unfounded but which he hadn’t had the energy to fight. Two assault charges, both of which were, admittedly, deserved, and both of which had left him within a hair’s breadth of jail time. And at his last programming job, sheer incompetence. He’d been a drunk and frequently snorting coke when those things happened, but it didn’t matter. Those were only the headlines. There was more stuff, too, plus the lawsuit that followed him around. There were only so many chances a man could have. Billy had used them all.

  “Don’t underestimate what I can do, Billy. I am Eagle Technology,” Shawn said, and for a moment, Billy saw himself leaping off the couch, smashing Shawn in the face, and then wrapping his hands around the bastard’s throat and squeezing until he could feel the cartilage snap and pop so that Shawn never breathed again. Maybe Shawn saw it, too, because he rushed to the next words. “But that’s neither here nor there. I’ve got a lot of latitude, and you won’t be working at the main campus. Again, I’m telling you, it’s a project that isn’t on the books. Oh, there will be a contract and everything. It’s a real job. Advantageous terms for you, with a very generous compensation package. But you’ll be working directly for me, in a personal capacity. You won’t be working for Eagle Technology. The board won’t know about it.”

  “I’ll be working for you? In a personal capacity?”

  Shawn nodded. “I know. I get it. It’s never going to be the same as it was back when we were at the old cabin, when we were working together. When we were partners. Too much history there. Okay? But hear me out. I want to make things whole.”

  “You want to make things whole?” Billy heard how he sounded, echoing Shawn like a parrot. His voice broken in the same way that he felt broken, and once again, he came back to the idea that what he wanted, at this very moment, was to punch Shawn in the face.

  Shawn stood back up, and for a moment Billy thought it was because he had seen something in Billy’s eyes and was scared. But no. It was only so that Shawn could walk over to the bar cart and pour himself a belt of vodka.

  “I want to do it right this time. I want to hire you—and Emily—to live in Whiskey Run. Past Whiskey Run. Right where it all started. I fixed up the old mansion,” Shawn said. “I want you to go back to where it all began.”

  TWO

  * * *

  IN WHICH EMILY WIGGINS TAKES A NAP

  Most days, she didn’t nap. Most days, by the time the kids in her class at the Bright Apple Preschool were settled in their cots and she and her co-teacher, Andy, had picked up the classroom, she was happy to just read a magazine. But Andy had told her to go lie down, so she’d pulled a cot out for herself.

  She supposed she probably looked tired. Billy had left yesterday afternoon, spending the night in a hotel in Baltimore before his meeting with Shawn today. She glanced at her watch. She figured they were probably talking right at that very minute. The thought made her sick. She’d begged Billy not to go. Things were bad, sure, but not that bad. Her entire marriage had been about helping Billy recover, first from what happened with Shawn and the company—most of which he refused to talk about—and then from his drinking. The coke was an issue, too, but really it was the drinking that he struggled with mostly. There were times when she hated him, when she thought about leaving him. There was even a time when she had actually left him for a few months. For most of the last two years, however, it had been good. Since he’d cleaned up. She was terrified that Shawn was going to upset the order of things.

  It wouldn’t have been honest to say that she didn’t blame Billy. She didn’t believe that being drunk was an excuse for anything, but it also wouldn’t have been honest to say that she didn’t understand. If it had been her, if she’d been the one who’d worked on a project like Eagle Logic, only to see it become a true phenomenon? Well, she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to let it go. When she said to him, “Just get over it,” what she was saying was, just get over the fact that this thing you helped create with the guy who used to be your best friend is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, of which, you ended up with . . . precisely nothing. And that was partly why, even though she begged him not to go, she didn’t forbid it. The other part of it was that she still harbored the hope that Shawn would offer them real money, that he’d finally do the right thing.

  She wasn’t going to hold her breath, though.

  She’d read once that inmates who’ve been wrongfully convicted have only two choices: to give up or to find some transcendent state where they could fight for justice without being bitter. It sounded stupid to her, but maybe it also made sense. She was still angry with Shawn for breaking his promises to Billy, but it didn’t consume her the way it consumed her husband.

  She blinked her eyes and looked at the small, gentle face of the girl sleeping on another cot next to her. Kira. Sweet kid. Emily let her eyes drift closed. She was tired. They’d been up late every night for a week, arguing about whether or not Billy should go, and last night, after he’d already left, she found she couldn’t sleep. She had bad dreams. Nightmares, really.

  It was so nice of Andy to suggest she lie down. The cots were too small for her, but they were comfortable enough. It wouldn’t be a long nap, only half an hour or so, but it would be good for her.

  She fell asleep just about the time that Billy said—

  THREE

  * * *

  THE
OFFER

  “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

  As Billy asked the question, Shawn wondered, not for the first time, if he’d made the right decision to rebuild Eagle Mansion. If he wanted upstate New York, why not just sell the land and get rid of Eagle Mansion and the groundskeeper’s cottage, let all those memories stay buried once and for all? Or even bulldoze the entire thing and let it return to the wild. Why try to reclaim it? Why build there? Why not build in Cortaca? He’d loved Cortaca from the first time he visited it, despite its proximity—or maybe because of its proximity, he was never sure—to Whiskey Run; he’d passed over Columbia and Stanford and MIT. He’d given a lot of money to Cortaca University over the years. He could have bought land outside of town. It wouldn’t have been as cheap as buying land in Whiskey Run, but it’s not like the money would have mattered. Cortaca would have been easy. A fresh start in a town he loved, with only the good memories of being a college student. The old estate and mansion would have been a safe distance away.

  But Eagle Mansion had a dark pull on him.

  For most of his teen years, he’d actively tried not to think about Eagle Mansion and what happened with his father, but the old buildings and his family history haunted him. The house had been a dark horse stalking his nightmares. At least once a month he bolted awake in his aunt’s house, twisted up in sweat-soaked sheets, a scream dying in his throat, sure that he was back in the groundskeeper’s cottage, Eagle Mansion a dark shape in the sky above. He heard the creak of floorboards in his sleep, saw twisted shadows behind the windows of the mansion while he dreamt fitfully. Once, when he was seventeen or eighteen, before he went to college, his aunt asked him if he wanted to go back for a visit. He’d just stared at her. No. He hadn’t been back since he was twelve. Since the fire. Until, in the weeks before they graduated, he’d started thinking of the cabin as a place where he and Billy could work and stay for free.

  Going back had been a mistake. They had made something great there, but there was something cursed about the place, too. Yet once he’d offered it up to Billy as a place they could stay for free, it was too late to take it back. For nearly two years they camped out there. Two years of the mansion’s dark-eyed windows leering over them, two years of the rain kicking up the scent of soot from the groundskeeper’s cottage. Two years of the nightmares back at full throttle.

  Once Billy and Emily had left the cabin behind, Shawn finished up his work and left it behind, too. It wasn’t a place he wanted to linger in. When anybody asked him where he was from, he said Syracuse and left it at that. Oh, it was public knowledge that his parents had died in the fire, that he’d gone to live with his aunt Beverly when he was twelve, but any article that even bothered to mention Eagle Mansion barely gave it a sentence. In the profile last year, in advance of his biography, in the New Yorker it rated a full paragraph:

  Eagle doesn’t like to talk about his parents. “So much of my life is public,” he says, “I feel like they’re the one thing I have to myself.” Before the fire, he lived with his parents on the grounds of the old eponymous Eagle Mansion, in upstate New York. It was originally designed as a palatial hotel to accommodate a hundred guests plus staff and servants. Eagle Mansion, meant to compete with hotels in the Adirondacks or in Bar Harbor, Maine, as a destination in itself, a place for both new and old money, is fifteen twisting miles north of a small town called Whiskey Run, which is itself thirty miles north of Cortaca, home of the Ivy League’s Cortaca University, Eagle’s alma mater. It’s far enough north to be perched on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River. Weather can be severe in the winter, with lake effect snow averaging 350 inches in an average year, but Eagle’s great-grandfather built the resort into a rollicking Prohibition playground for New York City folks who wanted Canadian liquor, gambling, and a no-questions-asked good time. It fell out of favor after the repeal, and by the time Eagle was a kid, the grand resort was a ruin. They lived in what had been the groundskeeper’s cottage. Cottage being a fancy name for a hovel. Snow dusted through cracks in the walls, and the only source of heat was the woodstove in the kitchen. It was that woodstove that started the fire that left Eagle an orphan. He’s in the middle of rebuilding and expanding Eagle Mansion—reputed by locals to be haunted—with the intent of using it as a part-time vacation home and a part-time “technology institute.” He calls it a reclamation project, proof that “you can go home again.”

  The rest of the article gave a quick gloss to Aunt Beverly’s taking him to live with her in Syracuse, a digest version of his time at Cortaca University and in the cabin after graduation, the dispute between him and Billy—the official, sanitized version. Mostly, the article focused on how he’d built Eagle Technology into a behemoth. A pure cult-of-personality kind of article. Same thing with his authorized biography. Eagle Mansion got two pages in Learning to Soar: The Story of Shawn Eagle and the Rise of Eagle Technology. People took it at face value that he didn’t want to talk about his parents, and since it didn’t seem to play into the narrative of Shawn Eagle as genius and tech baron—his mom’s sister, Aunt Beverly, was a science teacher and the one who taught him to code—Eagle Mansion was never much more than a footnote.

  And yet. He couldn’t leave it alone. It was always an itch. He’d gone a few years ago, just for the day, just to look. The mansion was even more decrepit. Choked with creeping vines, seedlings sprouting from the gutters. The windows jagged with glass or completely open to the elements. The tight, dark forest pressed hard against the building, shadows keeping secrets even in the midday sun. But he couldn’t shake it. Couldn’t let go of the idea of evicting his memories, of exorcising all his ghosts. He had the money to fix it up, and so he did. There were bad memories there, but there were good memories, too.

  Weren’t there?

  Billy stood up from the couch and said it again: “Are you out of your goddamned mind? You want me to go back and live in that cabin? What, there aren’t enough bad memories haunting me from the first time?”

  “You aren’t listening,” Shawn said. “First of all, I want you and Emily to go. Together. You’ll lose your mind up there by yourself. And I don’t want you to live in the cabin. The thing’s a museum now. Literally. I donated it to Cortaca University. I had the thing disassembled and then completely reassembled on campus. It’s right next to the new Eagle Computing Pavilion.”

  Billy glared at him, and Shawn had the overwhelming itch to call out for Wendy, for his security, for somebody to come running, because Billy looked like he was going to jump him. But he bit it down.

  “Okay. Give me a second. Remember how Aunt Bev wouldn’t let me sell the old mansion?”

  Aunt Bev’s name placated Billy. Peace seemed to wash over his face.

  “I always liked her,” Billy said. “I feel bad that I lost touch with her. Even with everything that happened in the cabin with us, and all the stuff with Emily, she deserved better from me. How is she?”

  “She’s dead,” he said. “You didn’t know?”

  “Shit. I’m sorry, Shawn.” Billy looked down at his hands. He really did look sorry, Shawn thought. That, or he’d become a better actor in the dozen years since they’d split ways. “She was a good lady,” Billy said. “She was good to me. She treated me well. Even when everything was . . . Well, I always liked her. She sent me Christmas cards for the first couple of years, but I never wrote back, and then I figured she’d just lost track of me. But . . . Shit. I’m so sorry. When was it?”

  “Six years ago. Breast cancer.” Shawn was surprised that he had trouble swallowing. One of his first memories was going to visit her with his mother when he was just a little kid. Or was it more than a visit? Was it one of the times his mother had tried to run away from his father? He’d loved Aunt Bev fiercely, and she’d loved him back. She was a quiet woman, self-contained. She wasn’t the sort who could stand up to Simon Eagle, but then again, not many people could. She’d tried, though. She’d really tried. Aunt Bev had done her best to save her sister. But i
t wasn’t enough. Which might have been why she gave so much of herself to Shawn after the fire.

  “She was a good lady, yeah,” he continued. The office felt small, even though it was almost laughably big. Shawn knew how crazy it was to have an office that took up half the floor of the building. But it was a power play of sorts. Having an office that big, that ostentatious, wasn’t about what you needed, it was about saying to anybody who entered, I am a man to be reckoned with. I have power. I can do what I want. But at that moment, it felt tight, almost confined. He didn’t want to talk about Aunt Bev. He didn’t want to talk about his parents.

  “The point wasn’t to bring up Aunt Beverly, though. It was just a way of saying she was right when she made me keep that chunk of land. I used to think I couldn’t wait to unload it.”

  “Some bad memories.”

  “You ever go back?” Shawn asked. It surprised him, the question coming out of his mouth. He didn’t know what made him ask it. It surprised Billy, too, clearly.

  Billy squinted at him. He paused. And then, finally, he gave a sharp shake of his head. “No. But Emily did.”

  Now it was Shawn’s turn to be taken aback. “Really?”

  “She went on a trip with her sister—”

  “Beth?”

  “Beth. And her brother-in-law. Emily flew out to Chicago and the three of them drove out and did a few weeks of hiking the Appalachian Trail.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “Not really my thing. But on the way home, they took a detour, just a quick visit. Camped out there overnight. Emily said it was creepy as hell being alone in a tent, a hundred yards from Beth and my brother-in-law. Beth liked it there, though. Claims that’s where my nieces were conceived. So, yeah, Emily’s been back there, but not me. God. I can’t believe you kept the place.”