I stare out at the trees, mulling over my story, puzzling at the edges of the narrative we’d conceived—Ashley and Michael—until the pieces feel like they fit together smoothly enough. A strange mood has come over me, a churning mix of anticipation and nostalgia, a feeling that something is lurking in the shadow of the pines that I should be trying harder to see. I don’t realize that my knee is jittering until Lachlan puts a hand on my leg to steady it.
“Having second thoughts, love?” He looks at me askance, squeezes my thigh with long warm fingers.
The weight of his hand on my leg anchors me. I weave my fingers between his. “Not at all. Are you?”
He gives me a bemused look. “Too late now, isn’t it? She’s expecting us before bedtime. If we don’t show up she might call the cops and God knows that’s the last thing we need.”
And then the address is before us. From the road, you wouldn’t even know the estate was there. The property is unmarked, just a high stone wall with an iron gate along Lake Shore Drive. Lachlan buzzes at the intercom and has barely taken his finger off when the gate creaks open, squeaking on its iron hinges. The driveway stretches into the pines, which are softly lit from underneath by solar lights. I roll down my window and sniff at the air. It smells like damp things: tree roots and decomposing needles and the moss growing down at the lake. It stirs something inside me, a familiar juvenile melancholia: Those lights, the way they dance like spirits in the wind-tossed trees. The mist, the way it reflects diamonds in our headlights. Something magical is here in this grove; all the possibility of my past youth gathering here again, feelings I’d long ago forgotten.
We pass a grass tennis court, the net sagging with mildew, and a handful of small wooden outbuildings: maids’ quarters, a butlers’ cabin, all dark and shuttered. Down the tree-lined slope toward the lake, I glimpse the boathouse, a hulking stone structure that hugs the shore. Finally, the road makes a sharp turn and Stonehaven shoots up before us like a great gray ghost in the gloom. I make a strange sound in my throat despite myself. I’d spent so long looking at photos of the house online, but they hadn’t steeled me for the familiar coldness of Stonehaven, monumental and admonishing.
The mansion is an anachronism, a stone monolith crouching under the dense pines of Tahoe’s West Shore, timbered and guarded like some sort of medieval fortress. The house hinges at its center, the two wings connected by a three-story stone tower with narrow windows at its peak; it stands watch, like a castle keep, as if girded for an onslaught of intruders. Two chimneys bookend the home, stones mossy and streaked orange with age. The entire house is surrounded by a portico, with the trunks of enormous pine trees serving as pillars. Everything about the house that isn’t stone is shingled and painted brown, presumably to blend in with its natural surroundings; but it also gives visitors the sense that the house itself is retreating into the darkness of an encroaching forest.
Stonehaven. Three stories, forty-two rooms, 18,000 square feet, plus seven outbuildings. I’d done some reading before we drove up, dug up a handful of photos in a back issue of Heritage Home magazine. The house was built in the early 1900s by the first American-born Liebling, a Gold Rush opportunist who had lifted his family out of their immigrant poverty and launched them into the new century as American aristocrats. At the turn of the last century Lake Tahoe had already become the chosen summer residence of the West Coast industrialist tribes. Liebling bought himself a mile of pristine lakefront forest, built his pile, and settled in to study his fellow millionaires across the lake.
Somehow the family has hung on to all that land, five generations on. The house itself has been largely untouched since the day it was built, other than the occasional interior decorating whims of the successive residents.
Lachlan stops the car in the drive and we stare at the house together. There must be something audibly wrong about the way I’m breathing—as in, I’ve practically stopped altogether—because