The Mansion Page 9

  By the time he was finished, he realized he was screaming at Shawn, that specks of spittle were flying out of his mouth and he was snarling. He expected Shawn to look scared or maybe even angry, but what he didn’t expect was for Shawn to look sad. It was enough to make him back off.

  “You’re talking about money, Billy. That’s something different, and you know it. We trusted each other once, didn’t we? Trusted each other as much as two people ever could. And I trusted you. Don’t you remember telling me that I could trust you? That I could trust you with Emily? Some breaches of trust are worse than others.”

  Billy sunk back into his seat, feeling hot and ashamed.

  “Just wait until we get there,” Shawn said.

  SEVEN

  * * *

  BIRDS OF PREY

  The way the road just opened up so that all you could see were trees and the sky and then suddenly you topped the rise and—BAM!—there it was: Eagle Mansion in all its resplendent glory. When Shawn told Billy that the road was the same one they’d driven when they lived in the cabin, he was telling 93 percent of the truth; the last mile or so took a different track. That was one of the reasons Shawn was paying Fisker DeLeon such a ridiculous fee. Fisker had been the one to suggest regrading the last part of the road to follow the landscape, so that it emerged out of the woods with the estate coming into view all of one piece.

  But he heard Billy’s sharp intake of breath at the sudden view, and he knew that Fisker was worth it. Shawn had ridden hard on the details of the mansion, particularly when it came to the parts where Nellie was going to be integrated. He knew he was involved to a level that drove Fisker crazy, but if that greedy bastard hadn’t already been famous before Shawn hired him, he would have been famous by the time the campus, Whiskey Run, and Eagle Mansion projects were finished. And as much as it pained Shawn to do so, he had to admit that Fisker was a genius in his own greedy, architectural way.

  Today, it was a particularly stunning view. Mostly it was the way the road rose as it came out of the woods, so that you couldn’t see what was before you until suddenly, you could, but they’d also been blessed by midmorning light that filtered through a gentle haze of clouds with an amber glow that felt like it had been ordered up especially for him. All that plus early September’s first blazes of color turning the trees into a tourist destination in their own right. It didn’t matter that there were construction vehicles scattered across the grounds and around the mansion like some giant, godlike child had tossed his toys in a fit of spite; Eagle Mansion itself deserved the intake of breath from Billy.

  The last time they’d been here together was the day Billy drove away with Emily a dozen years earlier. To say it had been different back then was almost laughable. Fifty, sixty years of the woods and lawns growing unchecked. Trees and brush and weeds everywhere. The scattered outbuildings falling in on themselves. If the cabin they’d lived in had been their best choice, the rest of the estate had been a rough place indeed. Eagle Mansion was a wreck back then, and that was a charitable way of putting it. Coming back to it after college, Shawn somehow thought it would be the same as it had been when he left at the age of twelve. Not surprisingly, it was worse: broken windows, collapsed roof, crumbling rocks and falling timbers. It had looked like a jack-o’-lantern left on a porch three weeks past Halloween: something spooky and sordid, collapsing. Eagle Mansion was rotting from the inside out.

  But that was then. This was now. And now was worthy of Billy’s gasp. The new Eagle Mansion was somewhere between a traditional Adirondack-style lodge and the kind of place you could find in the mountains out west. And yet it also looked like nothing less than a bird about to take flight: the building was two wings flaring out from a central spire, angles and windows like teeth and claws. It was three stories tall with steep eaves and gables like witches’ hats to shed the winter snow. The foundation was hand-laid fieldstone. The body of the building was timber from old-growth trees, logs that were thick enough that two grown men would have had to link up to put their arms around them. The mansion was perched on the slope of the hill overlooking the river, the road bringing them in at an angle. You could see the outside of the grand dining room; the French doors had been swung open in the warm fall air, leading to the great stone patio. In front of that, a new, Olympic-sized infinity pool, the tiles glittering and blue even without any water, was set into the fieldstone decking. Part of the reclamation project had been to clear away most of the outbuildings—the old cabin they’d lived in had already been dismantled and trucked off to Cortaca University well before renovations had started—but he’d left the burned-out groundskeeper’s cottage mostly as is. It had a new roof, door, and windows, enough to keep it somewhat preserved, but otherwise, it had been left alone. All the other outbuildings were new, however, matching Eagle Mansion in tone and design. From the road, you couldn’t see the rebuilt living quarters for on-site and visiting staff, made airy and bright now, nothing like the squat, narrow, mean section of the original building. What you could see was the scale of Eagle Mansion. Fisker had salvaged as much material as he could, working from old photos to re-create Eagle Mansion while also reenvisioning it. With sixty guest bedrooms, a dining room and bar, spa facilities, the old casino converted into conference rooms and offices, updated kitchen facilities, guest services, staff quarters, and various other expansions, it was almost twice the size of the original building. It was almost impossible to look at it and remember the wreck it had once been. This new Eagle Mansion put nature in its place.

  And then there was the addition.

  Shawn drove the SUV down the hill, toward the river, and then the road curved back up to bring them straight at Eagle Mansion so they had a terrific view of the addition.

  “It’s a little embarrassing,” he said to Billy, “but we’ve been calling it the Nest. I’m open to suggestions if you have a better name that makes me sound like less of a douchebag.”

  He didn’t have to explain what it was.

  The addition sat on top of, but also apart from, Eagle Mansion. It was a flattened bubble of glass and steel connected to the main building through a cylinder that rose from the middle of the mansion. The Nest was only a single story, but that single story was twice the height of one of Eagle Mansion’s stories. Twenty-four feet top to bottom, it floated six feet above the main building and ran about a fifth of the length of the mansion to either side.

  “It looks like the Nest is cantilevered, but there’s a single beam running all the way across and anchored to the central tower, which is, itself, the backbone of Eagle Mansion. Sort of like a lollipop stick. The elevator and the main stairs are inside the central tower and open into the mansion. You can ride the elevator all the way up if you want, though you have to have security access, obviously. The stairs are a different matter, but still contingent on security access. It’s part of Eagle Mansion while being completely apart at the same time. As you’re looking at it from here, on the right is the great room—open kitchen, dining space, living space—and on the left is the bedroom, and where you’ll be working, my office.”

  He tried to take a quick peek at Billy, to see his reaction, but he needn’t have bothered with discretion. Billy was full-on gawking at Eagle Mansion and the Nest, leaning forward in his seat with his hands on the dashboard. It was all Shawn could do not to chortle.

  One architect who’d tried to win the job had given him drawings that would have simply extended the mansion a story. Shawn could see why the architect had gone that way. It would have made sense, would have been the classic move, an almost seamless addition. Nearly perfectly invisible. Shawn’s personal quarters seemingly an integral part of the original design. But it was also idiotic. The whole reason he could afford to scoop up thousands of acres, the whole reason he could build this “folly” in the middle of nowhere was because he’d mastered glass and metal, because he sold slick, shiny bricks and lines of code. Why would he want to be subtle? He was fixing up the mansion, making it better w
hile respecting its past. Wasn’t that enough for the history books? For himself, Shawn wanted something that looked to the future. It was Fisker who’d given the building life, who’d come up with the idea of hewing to the past with the main part of the building and leaning forward with a floating nest for Shawn Eagle. It would have been cheaper by a factor of three just to knock the whole thing down and start from scratch, but Shawn wanted to keep the bones. Why bother building here in the first place if he wasn’t going to acknowledge the past?

  And yet there were times when he wished he had knocked the whole thing down and walked away; even with everything rebuilt and added to, the Eagle Mansion from his childhood was still there, haunting him.

  It was as if the reconstructed and expanded Eagle Mansion had overlaid the old one. A fresh shell on top of a rotten core. A parasite worming through the body of an infected host. In certain lights and certain moments, the building had an odd stuttering quality for him. The ghost of the old Eagle Mansion rippling under the surface of the new. Still there. Brighter, maybe. As if by fixing it up he’d given the haunting a new life.

  He thought of that sometimes, that maybe he’d brought the past to light instead of burying it. Evil—and he wasn’t sure there was a better word to describe his father or what he’d been told about his grandfather and great-grandfather—had a way of echoing. You could never, no matter how much you tried, start completely fresh. History had a way of resisting your best intentions. Sometimes he felt that Eagle Mansion stood sentinel, a dark guard, ominous and brooding, watching over the hill and the valley and the river, watching over him the same way it had watched over his ancestors, making sure the past would never be left behind.

  But he could have been imagining it, because that wasn’t what Billy was seeing.

  “Holy crap,” Billy said under his breath.

  Shawn tried not to smile. They were still driving up the blacktop, the scale of Eagle Mansion inescapable. On the south side of the lawn, a crane swung a rock in a sling toward a scattering of other equally sized rocks, each one bigger than the SUV they were driving in. A row of five dump trucks was disappearing up the hill on the other side of the mansion, into the woods. On the sprawling lawn, six trailers were clustered into a sort of village to serve as offices for the construction effort. The foreman had assured Shawn that those would be out by the end of October, when most of the work was finally done. There was still the metal-pole barn near the creek that had served as a temporary storage area, but that was scheduled to come down next week. There was no point anymore. The construction was in the touch-up stages. In the spring, after the snow melted, the last of the landscaping would happen, and by next summer, he’d be bringing guests.

  “Whoa,” Billy said. Shawn glanced over, but Billy wasn’t looking at the estate. He was looking off to the side, where the trees grew thick again. “Did you see that?”

  Shawn was annoyed. Billy was supposed to be looking at Eagle Mansion. “No. What?”

  “I think it was a mule deer. It had a huge set of antlers, and it was pure black. It looked like something out of a dream. Or a nightmare.” Billy shook his head. “I only saw it for half a second, though. Honestly, I might have just imagined it.”

  “Probably,” Shawn said. “With all the construction and people around, most of the animals are probably scared off.”

  “Yeah.” Billy turned back to the building in front of him. “How big is it?” he asked.

  “The mansion? Sixty guest rooms plus conference facilities and living space for staff. Kitchens and dining room and spa and workout facilities. All that kind of crap.”

  “No,” Billy said. “The Nest.”

  “Oh. That’s more reasonable. It’s a private space. Lots of open space and light.”

  “It’s night and day from the mansion. It looks like it’s about to take off and fly to Mars.”

  “Is that a good thing?” Shawn said. There was a part of him that was angry he had to ask. Couldn’t Billy just come out and say it, that it was stunning?

  “I mean, I’m not exactly the right person to ask. It’s modern. That’s for sure. Different. The mansion is beautiful, old-school rich-person beautiful, and I like that you kept some of the old character. You could totally imagine, in the right light, that it’s haunted. Maybe that’s just an intrinsic part of the building’s personality. You know, if buildings have personalities.” He flashed a grin coupled with a quick bark of a laugh. “I’m not going to find bloody wallpaper in one of the guest rooms, am I?”

  “Shit. You should have tried being a kid here. That was spooky.”

  “Yeah, I know. No electricity or running water. Blah, blah, blah. You had to make do with gas lanterns and a woodstove, and once the pump broke, you had to carry water up from the river. In the winter, you had to bring an ax down with you to break through the ice so you could get water, and it was uphill both ways,” Billy said. There was something of a hard edge to his voice, but it was nothing that Shawn could call him on.

  “You weren’t here,” Shawn said. He tried not to snap. He was thinking of his father. He was thinking of the fire. “It wasn’t a good place to be a kid.”

  “Don’t forget that I lived here with you through two winters.” The hard edge in Billy’s voice was unmistakable now. “You never tired of telling me how cushy it was in the cabin compared with what you had to suffer through as a kid. No matter how shitty the woodstove was in that cabin, you’d point out that we mostly had electricity and the hand pump for water, which was more than could be said about the groundskeeper’s cottage. Nothing could ever compare to what poor Shawn Eagle had to suffer through as a kid.”

  Shawn took a deep breath. De-escalate. Redirect. He tried to sound light, as if this were all something silly. “Fine, fine,” Shawn said, “but I’m telling you, there’s a difference between being here as a kid and being here as somebody out of college. When we were here, it was an adventure.”

  “If you say so, Shawn. If you say so.”

  Shawn waved as they passed a couple of guys working on the lawn. With most of the job wrapped up, there were fewer than a hundred guys on-site. Some days, when things had been full speed, there had been three hundred men on-site here and another five hundred in Whiskey Run. They’d had chartered buses running the crews up from Cortaca and Syracuse and Albany, and more buses down from Ottawa.

  He brought the car to a stop in front of the mansion. The foreman was waiting for him on the steps. The bodyguards in the other SUV pulled off to the side. Billy reached for his handle, but Shawn touched his shoulder. “Come on, man. Remember going through the cellar tunnels and coming across that cache of booze that had to have been from Prohibition days?”

  Billy nodded. “And after drinking some of it, we got lost trying to get back out? Hell, man, I honestly thought we might die down there.” He started to laugh, and it caught Shawn, too. “How can that be such a funny thing? I remember it as a hoot, but seriously, we were stuck down there for what, five, six hours? I was absolutely terrified. When we were down there, I believed every single scary story you ever told me about this place and its history. There was a part of me that thought we might never come out. It was like a rabbit warren.”

  “Still is. When we first started the renovations, we were going to dig them out, but they’re so extensive and wind so insanely through the hillside that we couldn’t dig them out without messing up the site. Basically, the tunnels are walled off so that nobody can get into them. I don’t want one of my guests disappearing forever.”

  They both stopped laughing. Neither one said the name, but they both thought it.

  Disappearing forever.

  Takata.

  Shawn looked over at the steps. The foreman was waiting, but he’d wait as long as Shawn made him. He wasn’t ready to get out of the car. He felt unexpectedly sad. Deeply sad. Regretful of what had been lost. “It’s not the same as it was. I know things went south for us, and I’m sorry, Billy. I truly am.” He could feel himself stumbl
ing over the words. “I don’t know. What I’m trying to say is, you were my best friend. I’ve never felt as alive as I did when we were out here working on Nellie and then Eagle Logic. Despite what happened with . . . that thing, the work felt vital. And our friendship felt vital. All of it. It felt like the most important thing I’ve ever done. So maybe that’s part of it, maybe that’s part of why I rebuilt Eagle Mansion, why I’m bringing you out here. I need you to know that the time we spent together was important to me.”

  He paused and looked at Billy. Billy nodded.

  “Okay,” Shawn said. “Good. But I can promise you that it’s only a small part of it. This project, calling you in to help me, it’s not just about trying to recapture what it felt like to be young. Look, it would be great if this somehow let us mend some fences, but that’s not the point. You’ll see as soon as you step inside Eagle Mansion. It’s cushy in there now. Fisker kept the shell and the idea, but it’s a fundamentally different building.”

  “Fisker?”

  “The architect. Same guy doing the Eagle Technology campus. He gave the mansion new skin and bones. Uh, and organs.” Shawn shrugged. “And the addition. So maybe the house as a living being isn’t a great analogy, but the point is, it’s fully modern on the inside. Sure, if you hold up your hand to block out the Nest, it looks like a brand-new version of a mansion from the 1920s in the same way that Whiskey Run looks old-timey, but inside everything is environmentally certified. Sustainable luxury. The kitchen is like a surgery lab, shiny and bright. And the infirmary is a surgery lab. I mean, to the point where Nellie will be able to do minor surgery. Everything is wired up.”

  He looked up at Eagle Mansion and the addition. “Nellie’s in there, Billy. She’s waiting for you.”

  “Even with the construction going on?”

  “They’re almost done, but no. Not in Eagle Mansion. With the construction going on I’m keeping her under wraps—asleep, so to say. She’s still got some . . . They’ve all signed nondisclosure agreements, but I don’t think they need to know about her yet. The entire mansion is wired for Nellie, but right now, I’ve only got her functional in the Nest. And only when there’s nobody else there. Like I said, she seemed fine in testing back in Baltimore, but we’ve had some serious problems here, so I wanted to limit her exposure. What’s the expression? Walk before you run? That’s my thought. But let me show you the outside first. We’ll do a tour, and then I’ll bring you in and you can have a proper visit.” He opened his door.