“We agreed that we wouldn’t use Beth against each other. But if something happened that I need to know about, you have to tell me.”
Alan considered his wife’s words carefully, then shook his head. “If you want to know what’s happening with Beth, talk to her. After all, she lives with you, not with me.”
Carolyn stood at the door until Alan was gone and she could no longer hear his car. Then she closed the immense carved-oak front door and started toward the kitchen. But before she had crossed the foyer, her mother-in-law’s icy voice stopped her.
“Carolyn, we still have guests.”
Carolyn hesitated, torn. Then, as if drawn like a puppet on a string, she turned to follow Abigail Sturgess back to the library.
It was nearly midnight when Carolyn finally went through the house for the last time, making her nightly check to be sure the windows were closed and the doors locked. It was unnecessary—she knew that. Hannah went through the house too, as she had done each night for the last four decades, but Carolyn did it anyway. When Phillip had asked her why one night, she hadn’t really been able to tell him. She’d said that checking the house helped make her feel that it was really hers, and that it was a habit left over from all the years before she’d married Phillip. But it was more than that.
Part of it was a simple need to reassure herself, for every night before she went to sleep, she listened to the old house creaking and groaning in the darkness until she could stand it no longer, and giving in to what she knew were irrational fears, got up to search through the rooms to make sure everything was as it should be. After the second month—last February—she had decided it was easier simply to make her rounds before she went to bed.
But it was more than that. There was something about Hilltop House at night—after Abigail had gone to bed—that drew her with a fascination she rarely felt in the daylight. During the day, Hilltop always seemed to her to be trying to shut her out. But at night, it all changed, and the cold stone took on a different feeling, less forbidding and chilly, cradling her, assuring her that no matter what else happened, the house would always be there.
She wandered slowly through the rooms, pausing in the dining room to gaze, as she often did, at the portraits of all the Sturgesses who had once lived in this house, and were now in the mausoleum or the small graveyard behind it. They gazed down on her, and she sometimes imagined that they—like Abigail—were disapproving of her. But of course that was ridiculous. Their expressions of vague contempt had nothing to do with her.
Nothing to do with her personally, at any rate.
Tonight she sank into the chair at the end of the immense dining table, and stared up at the portrait of Samuel Pruett Sturgess. The soft light from the crystal chandelier glowed over the old picture. Carolyn examined it carefully. For some reason she had almost expected the old man’s demeanor to have softened tonight, as if meeting his grandson that afternoon had pleased him.
But if it had, the portrait gave no hint. Samuel Pruett Sturgess glowered down from the wall as he always had, and Carolyn caught herself wondering once again if the founding Sturgess had been as cruel as he seemed in the artist’s depiction of him, a mean-faced, stern-looking patriarch.
Had the artist heard the rumors about Samuel Pruett, too, or had the rumors about him only begun after his death? There had been so many stories whispered about the old man, his rages, his ruthlessness, that some of them must have been true. And in Carolyn’s own family …
She shuddered involuntarily, and was once more glad that both her parents had died long before she married Phillip Sturgess. In her family, hatred for the Sturgesses had run deep, and all the rumors had been accepted as fact. For the last child of the Deavers to have married a Sturgess would have been, for both her father and mother, the ultimate shame.
The Deavers had lived in Westover as long as the Sturgesses, perhaps longer. And in Carolyn’s family, the legend had always been that Charles Cobb Deaver—Carolyn’s great-great-grandfather—had been in partnership with Samuel Pruett Sturgess. Charles Deaver had been a cobbler, and the legend had it