The Mansion Read online

  Shawn nodded. “Well, that makes two of us, but every single time I thought about selling it, there was something that kept itching at me.”

  Something that kept itching at him. More like a hook lodged in his chest. Over the years, he’d come close to selling it, but somehow he’d never been able to give the orders. Every time he thought about telling his lawyers to get rid of it, he broke into a sweat, felt his throat closing up. It wasn’t a question of wanting or not wanting to sell it. He couldn’t sell it.

  “I fixed it up.” He paused. This was it. This was the moment. “Billy, listen, I have a job for you. I want—no, I need—you to go up there. Look, Billy—I know this is rich, right? Me coming to you, saying that I want you to do something for me? But this is a good thing, and I can help you. The past is past. We’ve all made our choices. Let me help you.”

  Shawn waited a minute to see Billy’s response. It pissed him off that he needed Billy’s help at all. He liked being in charge. He was used to being in charge, used to getting his way, and when you were as rich as he was, you never needed anybody as much as they needed you. But, dammit, he did need Billy, and he knew that telling Billy this wasn’t some sort of charity thing would cause a shift in the temperature of their restarted relationship. For good or bad, Shawn didn’t know, but there’d be a shift.

  “And I’m not saying I don’t regret all those choices. I’m not saying there aren’t some things I’d take back if I could. Don’t you feel that way, too? Aren’t there things you wish you could take back?”

  What those things were, they both left unsaid, but Billy gave a begrudging nod.

  “It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Shawn continued. “If I were asking you and Emily to live in my house here, in Baltimore, with me, fine, that would be weird. But I’m not. I’ll barely see you guys. This isn’t some ridiculous attempt to recapture what we had in the cabin, and it isn’t some crazy sort of way for me to try to steal Emily back.”

  Was it?

  No. He was sure it wasn’t.

  Shawn paused and took a sip of his vodka. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he was pretty sure how obvious it was that being in the same room again with Billy was unsettling for him. Billy looked so much older than Shawn remembered that when Billy first came into the office, Shawn had, for a moment, thought the wrong man had come.

  “Emily made her choice about you and me a long, long time ago, Billy. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  But maybe he wasn’t so sure. People changed their minds. Emily might change her mind. She’d made the wrong decision. No question.

  And maybe Billy was thinking the same thing, because he was angry.

  “And what,” Billy said, “you want me to be the caretaker? You looked into it and figured out we were having some hard times, so you figured, hey, Billy can be my charity case? Have me jumping around taking orders from you so that you can feel better about yourself? You flew me out here for that? To ask me to live in your little mansion in upstate New York? Some messed-up way of reliving our past, of trying to make it clear what my place is in all of this? Screw you, Shawn. I’m not a monkey you can put in a cage, and I’m not anybody’s houseboy.”

  Shawn should have known Billy would react that way. It had all come out wrong. It had been a long time since he’d seen Billy, but some things never changed. Here was Shawn starting by talking about personal history, when what he should have started with was the challenge.

  “Just hear me out, okay?” Shawn said. “I’m not wasting your time, I promise. I flew you out here for a reason. You. This isn’t a charity thing. It’s not about guilt or about trying to fix our past. I’ve got a job that I need done, and it’s a job for Billy Stafford, not just anybody. This isn’t some caretaker gig. I don’t need you living in the house so you can maintain the boiler and shovel snow off the roof and do odd jobs.” He couldn’t help himself. “Besides, it’s not a little mansion.”

  As the words left his mouth, he knew he should have stopped himself.

  Billy just shook his head and started moving to walk out of the office. Three steps up from the sunken lounge area, then turn toward daylight. Shawn was right after him, and when he grabbed Billy’s shoulder he was surprised to see him swing around, fist cocked back.

  Shawn froze.

  Billy froze, too, his arm still pulled back. Shawn wondered how long they stood like that, Billy waiting to hit him, Shawn waiting to be hit. Finally, a thousand years later, Billy unclenched his fist and used his hand to brush Shawn’s hand off his shoulder.

  “Do you really want to test me again?”

  Shawn took a step back. “Hey. I’m sorry. Okay? I mean it. Not just about . . . I’m sorry. Okay? Maybe there’s too much history between us. Maybe this is a stupid idea. I’m sorry. I thought, if you’d just listen to me, hear me out . . .”

  He lowered his head and waited. He really was sorry, not just for bringing Billy out here and opening old wounds, and not just for doing a bad job of explaining what the job was, but for all of it. Sorry that what they’d once had was gone, sorry for the secret they had to keep, sorry for the decisions he’d made. Most of all, he was sorry that even as he stood there, in his endless gleaming office, looking out over the buildings of his endless gleaming empire, there was still a part of him that wondered if Billy had come off better in the deal when he’d left the cabin with Emily.

  To his surprise, after a few seconds, Billy nodded. “Okay,” he said. “You’re sorry. It doesn’t mean I forgive you, but I’ll listen.”

  “Okay? Okay!” Shawn clapped his hands together and then grinned. “How about some sushi? Call it a late lunch or an early dinner or whatever. There’s a great place on the harbor with killer views.” Billy nodded again, so Shawn strode over to the door of his office and told Wendy to have the car come around.

  He and Billy didn’t talk much on the drive over. It wasn’t until they were tucked into their booth up against the glass on the second floor of the restaurant that Shawn tried again.

  “The land’s been passed down for generations. My great-grandfather was the one who built Eagle Mansion right after the First World War. It was the kind of resort that catered to the rich and famous.”

  “I know all this, Shawn. You do remember that I lived there with you for almost two years? I know the whole history. How many times did we get drunk and sit around telling ghost stories about the old place? All that crap about your grandfather, the story about the two teenage lovers who went out there and disappeared forever, the group of hunters who took shelter in a storm and who, one by one, killed themselves in increasingly disturbing ways over the years. Blah, blah, blah.”

  “Just listen, okay? Let me do my pitch. I’ve practiced this and I don’t want to waste it.” He was turning up his full charm, and even though Billy clearly saw through the bullshit, he also seemed willing to settle in for the show. “Anyway,” Shawn continued, “it was big-time. Politicians and baseball players and movie stars. Anybody who wanted a break from New York City or Boston or Chicago. You can go back and search the newspaper clippings. It was hopping during Prohibition. By the time you saw it, the whole thing was just a sad dump. I mean, if that cabin we lived in was the best building on the whole estate, you know that the mansion was in shitty shape. But you should have seen the pictures from the glory days! During the renovations we tried to salvage as much of it as we could, and it would have been cheaper to tear the whole thing down, but I wanted to keep that history. Well, keep it and also update it. I rebuilt it more than I renovated it, and I put a really modern addition on it that’s going to serve as my private residence when I’m at the estate. I’m going to use Eagle Mansion as a sort of invitation-only destination retreat for the high-end tech crowd. The mansion is beautiful, but really, without the addition and the upgrades, it’s just a fancy hotel. If you hold your hands up to block the extras, you could see it right at home in the Adirondacks or a national park somewhere. But that’s the thing. It does have the addition,
and it’s got the kinds of upgrades we used to dream about. That’s what the gig is. It’s not just a mansion,” he said.

  He leaned forward, staring right at Billy. He paused, speaking slowly, letting each word hit: “It’s the future, Billy, and I want you to be part of it.”

  He waited. Nothing. Billy stared back at him. “The future,” Shawn said, the words bubbling up almost nervously.

  Small cracks showed at the corners of Billy’s lips. And then Billy was laughing. Great, big, gulping guffaws. He laughed like he didn’t give a shit how it sounded, and Shawn thought that maybe Billy didn’t. After all, whom did Billy know in Baltimore? And to Billy, lunch with Shawn Eagle of Eagle Technology wasn’t some chance to impress.

  “My god, ha!” Billy was laughing so hard that he was actually crying now, Shawn realized. “Do you have, oh, holy crap, oh my, do you have any idea how pretentious you sound?” He banged on the table with his hand, a flat thump of joy. Billy let his voice drop in a rough imitation of Shawn. “ ‘It’s not just a mansion. It’s the future, and I want you to be part of it’? Please. Save it for the launch of your next phone.”

  Shawn blushed. He wasn’t just the CEO of Eagle Technology. He was the face of the company. The one who bounded onstage twice a year, at the end of their media events, to announce the next big thing, to hold up the newest piece of modern magic. Eagle Technology specialized in slick, seamless rectangles of metal and glass, and even though each device was just one more variation on a theme, people couldn’t buy them fast enough.

  “Okay,” Shawn said. “Let me try that again. I had this all worked out, you know. I had a little pitch ready for you. And I keep getting it wrong. Talking about us working in the cabin, talking about what happened with . . .” He almost said the name. Takata. But he didn’t. “Emily. Aunt Beverly. Ancient history. And then trying to sell you on this job like it’s another product.”

  “Maybe,” Billy said, taking a sip of his soda, “you shouldn’t try to sell me at all. I bought what you were selling once already, and that was enough for me.”

  Shawn nodded. “I need you, Billy. You, specifically. You’re the only one who can understand it.”

  The restaurant was almost completely empty. They were there in the soft heart of the afternoon, too late for lingering lunchers, too early for even the earliest sushi aficionados. On the first floor of the restaurant, there’d been a man in a suit and tie picking in a desultory fashion at the dregs of a plate of rolls, and even though the owner and the two waiters standing by the entrance recognized Shawn—and even if they hadn’t, it would have been hard to ignore the security team, six guys who looked the part—they’d taken their order and then gotten the hint that Shawn didn’t want to be bothered. He wasn’t even sure why he’d brought Billy here, why he hadn’t just had food brought into the office or, instead, gone fancier, waiting to take Billy to dinner somewhere so impossibly trendy that it couldn’t have done anything other than make Billy uncomfortable. Why here? Maybe because it reminded him of the way they’d sometimes splurge on supermarket sushi at the Wegmans in Cortaca, back when they were still coding together.

  “Shawn, for the love of god, what are you talking about?”

  Shawn leaned in and let his voice go quiet. Not that there was anybody around to hear, but he had to be careful.

  “I did it,” he said. “Those upgrades? She’s in there. When we rebuilt the mansion and put on the addition? I put her in there.”

  For the briefest moment Shawn thought that Billy didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then he saw the way Billy’s face shifted, first from blankness and then to incredulity—it couldn’t be possible—and then, so swiftly that Shawn wondered if he’d imagined it, to anger, before settling, finally, on wonderment.

  “Nellie?”

  Shawn nodded.

  Nellie. The name was silly, but unlike with Eagle Logic, the program and operating language that made almost everything at Eagle Technology possible—the stroke of genius that had made Shawn into one of the richest men alive—they hadn’t flipped a coin to come up with this name: he’d called the program Nellie, and it had stuck.

  They were cousins, of a sort, Shawn figured. Nellie and Eagle Logic. Or ancestors, maybe. Nellie had been the dream, but Eagle Logic was what they’d actually been able to build. Eagle Logic hadn’t been revolutionary, not exactly, but it had been enough of an advancement that he’d been able to build the empire of Eagle Technology on the back of Eagle Logic. Eagle Logic was like the first humanoids to walk erect; it’s not that they were so evolutionarily superior to the other monkeys out there, but rather that walking on two feet instead of all fours allowed them to use tools. That was probably the best way of thinking about Eagle Logic as compared to what had come before, to Google and Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. It was just enough of an advancement to give Eagle Technology the edge it needed for Shawn to build it into a behemoth, to make the other guys play catch-up, but could he argue it was anything radical? No. But Nellie—now she was radical, a real step forward. Not even an evolution.

  A revolution.

  “And goddammit,” Shawn told Billy, “I’ve done it! How long has it been since we first started trying to code Nellie? How long has it been since we realized that even if we’d been able to figure out the software, the hardware didn’t support it yet? Do you remember when, early on, we had to say we were being too ambitious, when we had to settle for what eventually became Eagle Logic? Do you remember how shitty it felt to give up on Nellie? Sure, Eagle Logic was good, but it was always a compromise. But we don’t have to settle anymore,” Shawn said. “I mean, come on. Jesus, Billy, I did it, and she’s out there, waiting for you in Eagle Mansion.

  “She’s in every wire. In every door and every window. She’s in the walls and the floors and ceilings, in the steps and lights and in every single damn room. She’s in the mansion.” He laughed. “She’s not in the mansion, she is the mansion, Billy. You can feel her presence, like a living, breathing thing.” Shawn leaned back. He felt a huge surge of relief and realized he’d been waiting for this. Waiting to tell Billy. That’s what he’d been looking forward to more than anything else about seeing Billy. More than flaunting his money and success, more than talking about the old days. This. Sharing the idea of Nellie.

  “But?” Billy said. “I’m hearing a ‘but’ in this. Because if you’ve really done it, then why am I here?”

  Shawn waited while the waiter brought over their food. He’d ordered sparingly, since he had a charity event to go to that night, a benefit for the Baltimore Orchestra that he’d been asked to host. Hosting, he knew, was code for “Will you please write us a check for a hundred grand or so?” But since he liked chamber music, or, at least, the idea of chamber music, he’d said yes.

  He watched Billy dive into the sushi, and it made him happy to see that Billy was both literally and figuratively hungry. Shawn knew Billy was trying to play it cool, but he also knew, down to the penny, how much Billy and Emily were in debt. His security team was thorough. They’d dug up all the dirt there was to dig and then some. He knew more about Billy than anyone else did. Did Emily know about all those credit cards? Did Emily know how badly Billy had mucked things up, how far underwater they were, or did she still think there was some hope?

  He picked up his chopsticks and threw a piece of salmon sashimi into his mouth.

  “Well, yeah,” he said, after chewing the fish. “There’s the rub.” He looked at his watch. “Listen. I hate to do this, particularly given our history, but I’ve got a meeting I cannot possibly cancel, and I have an event I have to go to tonight. What would you say to sticking around for another day? I’ve got to take off, but I’ll have Wendy extend the booking at the hotel. You can finish your lunch, and I’ll have a car bring you back to your room. I think the Orioles are playing tonight if you want to go to a ball game. You can have the company box. First thing in the morning, we’ll fire up a jet and go take a look at the mansion, and you can see N
ellie for yourself; then you’ll understand why I need you.”

  “I thought you said your jets, plural, were all unavailable. As I recall, two of them are being worked on, and Taylor Swift borrowed your spare.”

  Shawn considered Billy. The man looked a lot different from the boy he’d known. He had a sort of artificial gravity. Shawn wondered how much of Billy had been burned away by the drinking. Not all of him. That was for sure. The same old sharp Billy was still there, buried underneath the detritus.

  “Got me,” he said. He grinned. “What can I tell you? I’m an asshole. I figured you’d be happy enough with first-class seats and a limo ride.”

  Billy looked out the window for a few seconds, and Shawn was actually worried, just for a heartbeat, that he was going to walk away. But the hook had been set.

  “You were right. First class is a lot better than I’m used to traveling. You’re still a dick, though,” Billy said. But he was smiling when he said it.

  “I know,” Shawn said. “Some things don’t change, right?”

  Billy tapped his fingers on the table and then nodded. “First thing in the morning, you’ll take me to see Nellie?”

  “First thing in the morning,” Shawn said. He stood up from the table ready to go, but Billy stopped him.

  “Just tell me,” Billy said. “You’ve cracked it, but here I am. I’m the only one who can help. That’s what you’re saying. So why, exactly, am I here? What is it you need me to do?”

  “Call it an exorcism, if you like.”

  “An exorcism?”

  “Let’s just say there’s a ghost in the machine.”

  FOUR

  * * *

  CHOICES WERE MADE

  Emily Wiggins gave Percy a hug and then handed the little fellow his blanket. Percy had had an accident during nap time, and Emily helped him change into the spare clothes in his cubby and ran his other clothes and his blanket through the washing machine and dryer. The fuzzy yellow animal-print blanket still held a little residual warmth from the dryer, like an exposed rock on a summer’s day just after the sun has gone down. Percy clutched the blanket under his arm and then walked over to the snack table where the other classroom teacher, Andy Scoogins, had put out a tray of cut carrots. Emily never would have said it out loud, but Percy was her favorite. Maybe part of that was because Percy’s mother was such a piece of work. Emily secretly believed that by loving Percy Hedridge just a little bit more than all the other children, she could somehow save him.