the sense that she was driving off the grid entirely.
She turned off the highway onto the six-mile road that took her out to the Folger House, passing horse pastures and patchwork fields bordered by split-rail fences, then leaving those behind, too, as she drove into the Pine Barrens.
At the foot of the estate the gate already stood open and she drove between the gateposts with their stone dogs, feeling a shiver of anticipation as the wheels crunched over the slate chips of the circular drive.
The house was bigger than she remembered, and more strange, crouched between pines, and white as a shell.
The enormous circular drive was empty—somehow she had beaten everyone here. She shut off the engine and sat for a moment, staring up at the house.
Fine. I’ll wait. No way am I going in there alone.
The car door made a hollow thunk as she shut it—too loud in the stillness. The wind slipped through the tops of the pines, making the long and glistening needles shiver.
As she stood on the slate-chip path looking up at the house, she saw clearly for the first time that it was really three houses, joined by two two-story brick connecting walkways. The front of the structure was the original white house with its white-painted brick and patios and multiple archways and almost Spanish flavor. Then that smaller brick connector, two stories, attaching the Spanish house to the older main house, redbrick with white colonial pillars holding up its double porches. Then another small two-story walkway joining the brick main house to the separate white two-story shingled house that was comprised of the servants’ quarters. The long snakelike corridor she remembered from their first visit must stretch across all three separate parts of the house.
The wall of pines that surrounded the house were taller trees than she could ever remember seeing before, except for maybe the sequoias of Northern California. The height of that green wall gave an otherworldliness to the place that was awesome and unnerving.
Gravel crunched behind her and she whirled, startled.
“It’s okay, it’s okay.”
Brendan, of course, holding up his hands apologetically, flashing her that dangerously appealing grin. He was dressed in jeans and a cable-knit fisherman’s sweater, and looked like he’d just stepped out of a J.Crew catalog. Laurel pulled herself together. “I didn’t hear you. Where’s your car?”
“I parked around back to bring in the equipment and food.”
“How long have you been here?” she asked, surprised.
“An hour or two,” he said vaguely. “I thought it would be good to have everything moved in before our subjects get here so their first impressions of the house are as undiluted as possible.”
It made sense, she had to admit, but there was something about his arriving early that disturbed her, in a minor but nagging way.
“Let me help you with your stuff.” He grabbed the box of clean linens and bedding from her trunk, and she lifted out her suitcase. “We’ll go up the back way and save the main part of the house for a first walk-through,” he said, fairly brimming with enthusiasm.
They crunched their way over a path spread with more slate chips, the same gray as the roof, and onto a concrete path that led them past the round span of grass with the marble nymph at the head of the circle, past the elegant enclosed porch with the Colonial columns in front of the old main house. Around and above them the wind made a silky sound through the pines. At the back stoop Brendan juggled the box of linens to open the back door for Laurel, and she stepped inside.
The spell of the house, as before, was instantaneous, settling on her like a provocative dream. The silence was a palpable weight. They moved through the back hall into the house manager’s office and wound up around the creaky back stairs of the servants’ quarters to the long narrowness of the upstairs, the endless rooms.
“How many bedrooms are there? Did you count?” Laurel asked, breathless.
“It depends on how you want to define ‘bedroom,’ ” Brendan said over his shoulder. “Six along this upstairs corridor, plus a kitchen, three bathrooms, a study, and four or five of those weird nonrooms.”
As he spoke they passed through one of the nonrooms, where the corridor widened into a room the size of half a bedroom, with a divan and an end table under a window on the left, and a wall of linen closets on the right. Then the three extremely steep and