She leaned even closer. “Let me ask you a question,” she said, sliding her eyes to one of the portraits on the wall of a doleful woman with wide green eyes and long flaxen hair. As she struggled to find the words for her question, I wondered what she was going to ask me. Was it a proposition? A confession?
“If someone you loved committed suicide, would you return to the exact spot that they died and build a house on it?”
I give this some thought. It did seem in poor taste, even callous, that Tom would do such a thing. I thought back to how angry he had been earlier when he discovered I’d been in the basement. I had pegged him for a placid sort of guy, but the outburst was unnerving—he had actually looked like he might strike Maren. And yet she hadn’t had anything to do with the basement door.
“Have you heard what the workers have said?” she said, lighting another cigarette.
I shook my head. Workers? She meant the builders.
“They’re scared by this place. Many believe it is haunted. And for Tom to return here only months after she died and build a family home on the very site of her death . . .” Her eyes drifted away from me, suddenly filled with fear.
I opened my mouth to mention what had happened in the basement. The voice. The hand grabbing me. No, I told myself. Don’t mention it.
“You might call it superstition,” Maren continued. “In Norway, we call it . . .”
“Distasteful?” I offered.
“Egregious,” she countered through a mouthful of smoke.
“Do you think he is just in shock?” I said. “I mean, it’s a pretty awful thing to experience. The death of his wife, I mean. Maybe he wants to remember her here . . .”
“He’s been manipulated,” she said, in a way that suggested I had missed her meaning entirely. “Tom is not an evil man. Stupid, yes. But to come back willingly would have been egregious, even wicked. He was persuaded.”
“By who?” I said.
She ignored me. “When the first house was destroyed, he was furious. I mean, of course. I would be. A lot of money to lose because of a storm.”
I was struggling to keep up. “What first house?” I said. “Do you mean their home in London?”
“Basecamp,” she said. “The house they built before this new one.”
She rose from her seat woozily and gestured for me to follow her across the room to the hallway. Maren staggered forward, both hands against the walls of the hallway to steady herself. Fear zipped down my spine like someone had chucked a pint of cold water down the back of my shirt. What if Tom found us creeping about the house in the dead of night? Maren had the grace of a rhino on stilettos. She took to the stairs, lumbering down toward the kitchen. No, not the kitchen—Tom’s office. I followed her inside as she flicked on the light.
She reached for something on top of a filing cabinet in the corner. She hefted it down, almost dropping it. I reached out and helped her lower it to the floor.
“This was Basecamp,” she explained. I could make out that the model—a beautiful 3D-printed model—replicated the woods and the cliff, with a piece of shiny blue plastic for the fjord and a painted strip of blue for the river. A ladder seemed to stretch down from the house along the rock face to the bottom of the fjord, where a small beach was marked out with smooth plastic.
“They’d pretty much finished it, too. Aurelia loved it. Basecamp was her house. Tom wanted something more—what does he say? Oh, yes, innovative. Aurelia had wanted a more traditional Norwegian wooden house that sat on top of the cliff overlooking the fjord, so that’s what they built.”
“And what happened?”
Maren sighed. “Tom diverted the river, and when a storm hit, the river wrecked the foundations. They had to start all over again.”
She glanced at the wooden easel, on which sat a large, hand-drawn charcoal sketch of what looked like a pod hanging off the side of something. It was only when I made out the trees that I realized the right-angled shape was meant to be the cliff, and that the pod was a structure that was half in, half outside the rock face.
“That’s the new house,” she said, seeing that I was questioning the pod structure. “I know what you’re thinking. What kind of a house is that?