The Mansion Read online

  He rubbed his thumb nervously against the scar on his hand. He thought he felt something prickly against his thumb, but he couldn’t look away from the sight of the bottles of booze being put down in front of him. It was all cheap, off-brand crap. Billy flashed back to running into his old classmate, Raj, in the first-class lounge in the Baltimore airport after he had first gone to see Shawn. He’d like to see the cowboy’s reaction to Raj’s trying to order a glass of Macallan 25 in here. He’d looked it up. That stuff went for more than a hundred bucks a pour.

  The bartender finished unloading bottles and then pulled a knife from his belt to slit the tape and break down the box. He slid the box to the end of the bar and then started neatly stocking the bar. He spared Billy a few glances, but didn’t bother to take his order. Billy, for his part, had the good sense to stay quiet. Finally, after what had to have been close to five minutes, the sound of glass moving around and the warbled crooning of what Billy thought was probably Hank Williams the only accompaniment, the bartender turned to face Billy.

  “Let me guess. Beer and a shot?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  The bartender reached down for a glass, ran it hard through a tub of ice to fill it up, and then put it on the bar in front of Billy. He turned, opened a fridge under the counter, and pulled out a can of lemonade, popped open the top, and then poured it into the glass.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll have to settle for this.” He slid it forward and shook his head. “Don’t give me that gaping-mouth, innocent-sheep bullshit. I can tell an alky when I see one. How long you been off the sauce?”

  Billy felt himself absently touch the two-year coin through the fabric of his jeans. “How’d you know?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Takes one to know one. Plus, I might not have gone along with Eagle’s plan to tidy up the town, but that don’t mean I don’t know what’s what. Word is out that nobody is supposed to offer alcohol to the guy working up at Eagle Mansion. And I don’t recognize you from Adam, but it’s been a long time since I’ve had somebody come through that front door that ain’t got a tab or ain’t wearing a pair of work boots that they put to good use. Which makes you Eagle’s fellow. And just because I didn’t want him touching Ruffle’s don’t mean I don’t recognize what this means to the folks around here. Good jobs that pay good money. Kids getting a chance to go to college all expenses paid. My grandson is planning to go off to some liberal arts school in Maine and is pleased as punch about it. No sir. I ain’t going to muck all that up for everybody. If Eagle decides that what he wants to do is run around town naked with his pecker stuck in a tub of butter instead of running some sort of weird hotel at that haunted mansion of his, I ain’t going to bat an eye as long as he keeps dumping money into Whiskey Run. So you can sit down for a spell and I’m happy to jaw it up with you, but lemonade is about as exciting as it gets for you. You want to drink, you’re going to have to take your sorry ass down to Cortaca where nobody will recognize you.”

  Billy picked up the lemonade. It was carbonated, and he watched the bubbles fight past the ice. “I take it that buying some coke is also out of the question, then?”

  He was rewarded with a big grin and a genuine laugh from the cowboy. “Name’s Gene,” he said. “And sorry, I’m more of a pot guy. Not that I’m sharing that with you, either.”

  Gene had the kind of firm handshake that told you he could make it crushing if he needed to, but that he didn’t need to for you to understand he was a man. Turned out that when Gene wasn’t running Ruffle’s, he also ran a small farm. “Got turned on to organics about the time I got off the bottle myself, and it keeps me out of trouble. I work late hours here, and the couple of cows and goats and the few acres I have is enough for me to need an early start. I’m a lot less tempted to dunk myself in a bottle when I know I’ve got to be up at six to do my chores. It’s not ranch work, but there’s always something that needs tending or fixing.”

  To his surprise, Billy found the lemonade hitting the spot. He’d come into Ruffle’s fully expecting to have beer or gin, but the lemonade was sweet and fizzy and tickled his throat. He pulled out his phone and took a picture of the can. He’d ask Nellie to make sure there was some in the house. They talked of farming and what it had been like for Gene to watch Whiskey Run being transformed around him. While they talked, Billy drank the whole can of lemonade. Gene offered him another and a fresh glass full of ice.

  “Hope you’ve got cash money, Billy. Shawn Eagle don’t have no standing credit in my bar. Neither did his father, when it came to it.” He lifted the tab of the lemonade, the carbonation making a satisfying hiss, the ice clinking and settling as he poured it into the glass.

  “You knew his dad?”

  Gene picked up a rag and wiped the bar even though it looked clean to Billy.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Can’t say I was fond of the asshole, either. Might be why I was so stubborn about taking Eagle’s buyout. I’m a firm believer in the idea that the apple don’t fall far from the tree. My family’s been living in Whiskey Run for five generations, and the way I’ve heard it passed down, the only difference between the generations of Eagle men was how much money they had to wrap around themselves.

  “No, Simon Eagle was a full-on son of a bitch, but I ain’t embarrassed to say that I was too afraid of him to do anything about it. That man was mean and he could fight. I probably should have cleared him out of here, but I was drinking myself back then, and it don’t do no good to be poking at snakes.”

  Billy realized that he was scratching at the soft, shiny flesh of the scar on his palm. It was itching again. Crap. He looked at it and saw another little black hair poking out. He tried to grab it with his nails but it was too short. How the hell had Nellie missed that when she pulled the stitches out?

  “When you say he was mean, what exactly are you talking about?” He shook his head. “Sorry. Weird question, but do you have a pair of tweezers by any chance?”

  Gene kneeled down and pulled a small blue toolbox out from under the bar. He started rummaging through it. “About what you’d expect when I say he was mean. Beat the shit out of his wife. Beat the shit out of his kid. Got in fights whenever he could. Had a few girlfriends on the side, and the rumor was he wasn’t exactly gentle with them, either.”

  He suddenly stopped and stared at Billy. “You in here to cause trouble?”

  “Pardon?” Billy had picked up his lemonade and put it back on the bar.

  “Are you asking because you’re curious, or are you asking because you’re going to do something with it?”

  So Billy ended up telling him the whole story of how he and Shawn had holed up in the cabin after graduation, how they’d worked on Eagle Logic together but had parted ways because of Emily.

  Gene grunted. “I’d say it always comes down to a girl, except my grandson’s gay. Sometimes it comes down to a boy, I suppose. And you can’t tell me what it is exactly you’re working on?”

  Billy hesitated, but then he shook his head. “I’d like to. I really would, but sorry, Gene. Can’t.”

  “Well, I’ll trust that what you told me is true,” Gene said.

  It was. Billy had told him all of it. Almost. He hadn’t told him about Takata.

  “Although, nobody ever got into too much trouble for a little talking, right?” Billy laughed, pleased with himself for the joke.

  “I didn’t know the first Eagle, the one who opened up Eagle Mansion back after World War One, of course. I ain’t that old. My own grandpop did, though. Not well, but he cottoned to going out there a few times to get a taste of some of the off-menu offerings if you know what I mean.”

  “Honestly, Gene,” Billy said, “I have absolutely no idea what that means.”

  “Ah, here we go.” Gene pulled a pair of tweezers out of the toolbox and handed them to Billy. “Talking about whores.”

  Billy was about to squeeze down on the black thread kissing the surface of his skin, but he stopped and looked up
. “Whores?”

  “You can’t tell me you don’t know what whores are. Nah, my grandpop said that despite all the ways in which it was fancied up, Eagle Mansion wasn’t much more than a whorehouse. There was gambling and booze and rich folks wearing tuxedos, but the real draw was that, for enough money, you could have things you couldn’t get anywhere else.”

  Billy nodded. He was trying to get the tips of the tweezers to close around the end of the thread. “It’s the oldest profession, right?”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, my grandpop wasn’t embarrassed about having used a whore. He came from that generation, and it’s probably obvious that we ain’t the kind of family to be putting on airs. My grandson will be the first male in our family not to serve in the army.” He stuck his arm out into Billy’s field of vision. “Right there. My tattoo isn’t some sort of hipster bullshit. Service tat. But point is, my grandpop wasn’t a blushing daisy, and the fact that he didn’t like talking about what he saw out there at Eagle Mansion tells you something. Down in those cellars, he said, there were some things that just ain’t right.”

  Billy looked up again. “Under the mansion?”

  “Yep. There was the ladies who got to work in the house, but according to my grandpop, there were also the ladies they kept chained up.”

  “You’re shitting me.” He leaned forward, putting the tweezers on the bar. He ran his thumb over the scar again, the black thread a tickle on his flesh. That could wait for a few minutes.

  “Nope. He only talked about it the one time, and it was the one time I ever saw my grandpop look like he was ashamed of something. I wasn’t there, of course, and I can’t tell you I saw it with my own eyes, and I ain’t never heard nothing about it from nobody else, but I can tell you that my grandpop was sharp all the way up until the day he died, and he never gave me any sort of a bum steer.” Gene tapped his finger on the bar. “I believe it to be true. So, no, I wasn’t going to sell out to Shawn Eagle. All them Eagle fellows have been damaged kind of men. His great-grandfather might have built a big old mansion out there and brought in limousines from New York City and Boston, but at the end of the day, what Nellie Eagle was doing out there—”

  “Wait!” Billy sat up straight. He realized he’d grabbed Gene’s wrist and that the older man was looking at him coldly. “Sorry,” he said, letting go. “What did you say?”

  “I said, what he did wasn’t right. Keeping women chained up in those tunnels under the house to sell to his guests? My grandpop told me that there was even word going around that for enough money you could kill one of them if you wanted. Real sick stuff. Not much law enforcement around here, and what there was then was taking a cut of things, of course. A different time back then. Nowadays, a guy like that, you’d see a television show about him, the serial killer next door and all that. And I’ll tell you another thing my grandpop told me: there was no Mrs. Eagle back then. So you tell me, where did the baby come from? I read that Eagle says he got himself some Indian blood in him, and where did that come from?”

  Billy didn’t remember standing up, but there he was, standing up in front of the bar. He felt dizzy. Sick. If he hadn’t seen Gene open the cans of lemonade in front of him, he would have thought his drinks had been spiked. He almost wished they had been. That would have been so much better, he thought. If only Gene had poured him a beer or a gin and tonic, let Billy get well and truly drunk, and then let him stumble back out of Ruffle’s and to his car so the Honda could drive him back to Eagle Mansion and deliver him home.

  “No,” Billy said, “I meant, what did you say Shawn’s great-grandfather’s name was? The one who built Eagle Mansion?”

  Gene looked at him, clearly puzzled by Billy’s urgency. “Him? Nelson,” he said, “Nelson Eagle. But my grandpop liked to call him Nellie. He said nobody called him that to his face, because Eagle thought it was a lady’s name and it pissed him off something good, but that’s what they called him behind his back. Nellie.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  SNOW IS GENERAL ALL OVER WHISKEY RUN

  It was, all things considered, a nice visit to Chicago. Emily couldn’t really say that she’d needed a vacation—living at Eagle Mansion and not having a job and playing at writing a novel was pretty much a vacation, right?—but it felt maybe a little bit like she had actually needed a vacation. Ruth stayed home for the first three days after the surgery because she was looped up on pain meds, and Rose insisted on staying home, too. Beth just gave Emily one of those “I have absolutely no energy to fight this” looks and gave in.

  The funny thing was that both girls still stayed in sync. When Ruth took naps, Rose went and lay down, too, and she even developed the same drawn, wan look that Ruth had. By the fourth day, however, the pain seemed to be easing up, and the girls declared themselves ready to go back to a normal schedule. To celebrate, Emily took them out for ice cream and then made a detour to Unabridged Bookstore, one of her favorites, and loaded them up with some new books. She loved that she could do that, that she was finally in the position to spoil her nieces like she wanted to. She couldn’t help but fantasize that maybe it was time for her to be able to do that for her own kids, too. Not that she was pregnant yet—she’d gotten her period a couple of days before Ruth fell off the bed.

  She had a good visit with Beth, too. Her sister apologized again for poking her finger into old wounds, and they had a solid talk about it. Emily said there was nothing she could really do to assuage Beth’s concerns, and yeah, there was always the chance that Billy would go back to bad habits, but Beth had to trust that if it happened again, Emily would walk. “First sign,” she said, “and you’ll see me standing on your doorstep.” In the meantime, things were finally going well for her and Billy, and couldn’t Beth just be happy?

  The best thing, however, was that she’d finally started writing her novel in earnest. Not just playing at the idea of being an author, but actually writing. It was the private jet, of all things, that broke it open for her. She’d been sitting in one of the leather seats—so incredibly soft and lush that she kept stroking it—and it came to her like a bolt from the sky: instead of writing about a woman who’s rescued by a man, why not the other way around? Sure, maybe it had been done before, but everything had been done before. She pulled her laptop out and started right there, on Shawn Eagle’s private jet, borrowing all the details she could.

  Her heroine, Nellie Falcon—she’d come up with a better name later, she thought—was a tech entrepreneur who’d been burned by her first husband. She was successful and strong and happy, smoking hot and super rich, and here was the twist: she didn’t actually need a man. She could catch a tumble in bed whenever she wanted, and she wanted it often enough that the first thirty pages were pretty spicy: Nellie Falcon had no problem making her desires clear in bed. She didn’t need a man. Didn’t need anything. This wasn’t about rescue; this was about love. Uh, and sex.

  The pages just seemed to fly out of her. She was seventy pages in by the time she flew back to Whiskey Run, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. She’d talked to Billy on the phone a couple of times, but he’d sounded as preoccupied as always, and he didn’t mind that she stayed a few extra days in Chicago. Honestly, she was a little worried about heading back to Eagle Mansion. Was the well going to run dry on the book? She hadn’t been able to write when she was there before. She didn’t have much choice, though. She’d invited Shawn and Wendy to join them for Thanksgiving, and getting home Tuesday morning gave her barely forty-eight hours to pull it all together.

  Okay. That was overstating things, because the truth was, she could have shown up on Thursday at four o’clock, taken the time to shower and change, and still had Thanksgiving dinner on the table at five, because Shawn had insisted on having one of his cooks take care of everything. Emily had reflexively said no, but quickly changed her mind. She’d been trying to use this extra free time to cook more, but the honest truth was that she didn’t actually enjoy cooking, and worse, she
was kind of bad at it. Nellie was a huge help—she had access to every recipe on the internet, could track how much of each ingredient Emily used, and time everything—but there was only so much innate lack of talent that Nellie could help her overcome. So she’d said yes to Shawn’s cook taking care of everything, though Shawn had agreed readily enough to her insistence that it just be the four of them at dinner. No servers, and they could do their own dishes.

  She shouldn’t have worried about running dry on the book, though. Billy took a break from working when she got home, and they found themselves, very quickly, rolling around in bed. No wonder. She’d written three sex scenes and been thinking about other ones all week. It was good, both of them ripe with anticipation, and Emily couldn’t help thinking that maybe, with no birth control, this might be the time.

  Afterward, they went for a long walk along the Saint Lawrence. It had snowed off and on throughout November, but nothing that stuck for more than a few days. The forecast was calling for a good snow to hit either Wednesday or, even worse, Thanksgiving Day proper.

  “I’m glad we’re not flying anywhere for the holiday,” she said. She looked at Billy. He was a little out of breath, and she made a mental note to tell Nellie that she had to make sure he was getting some exercise. He couldn’t spend all his time working. “It’s bad enough trying to travel over Thanksgiving as it is, but if there’s going to be snow on the East Coast?”

  That afternoon, when Billy went back into his office—he was almost infuriatingly vague; he said that he’d unraveled some things, but that others were more complicated and ran deeper than he’d thought—she brought out her laptop again. When she pulled up her manuscript, she had a sudden and overwhelming moment of panic and jumped up from the table to make herself a latte. She was surprised to see that her hands were shaking, but as she carried her coffee back to the kitchen table, it suddenly came to her: Power Play. The title!