Authors: Wendy Webb
After dinner, Marion led us away from the drawing room and down the hall, to what I knew would be the east salon. We walked through the library in silence, Adrian and Drew exchanging worried glances, until we reached the room’s doors, which were open.
We entered the east salon to find candles flickering everywhere, a fire blazing in the fireplace, and a bar set up with cognac, B&B, Scotch, and other liqueurs I wasn’t familiar with. A tray of chocolates sat nearby.
The room was in beautiful contrast to how I had seen it before—first in disarray and then in stages of repair. The wood-paneled walls gleamed in the candlelight; a chandelier glittered above the round table. The sofas looked as good as new, and the floors shone with a fresh polish.
And yet, the very fact of setting foot in this room was making my stomach turn. Maybe it was the otherworldly experience I’d had earlier, but there was a sense of darkness here that made me want to run and hide.
“Mother,” Adrian said, gazing around the room with a strange look on his face. “I can’t believe it. You’ve opened it up again. Without consulting me.”
“Oh, darling,” she said, crossing the room and taking his hands in hers. “I thought it was time. Now, more than ever.”
He shook off her embrace and took a few steps forward, anger bubbling up from under his usually reserved facade. “We said this room would never be used again. Not until—”
“I know, my darling,” Mrs. Sinclair said, approaching him slowly, as though she were coming up on a wild animal. “But I realized yesterday that the only way is to open this room up. Now. I thought you were on board with this. You are the one who…”
But then everyone stopped talking. The silence hung around us like a tangible thing. I realized the others were staring at me. Drew’s mouth was open, his eyes wide.
“What?” I said.
“The resemblance is amazing,” Adrian murmured. “Seeing the two of them together like this, it’s really quite something.”
The painting was hanging back on the wall above the fireplace, where I had seen it before. There it was, in all of its ghastly glory, man with the severed head and all.
Mrs. Sinclair glided across the floor and took my hand. “Julia, darling,” she cooed. “When you came to us, Adrian said he thought you bore a passing resemblance to one of Havenwood’s most famous visitors.” She gestured at the painting. “I wanted to come in here to see for myself.”
“Who is she?” I wanted to know, staring at my mirror image.
“She is Seraphina, my dear.”
“Seraphina?” I parroted. “From your novel?”
“Not quite,” she said. “I patterned my character after her. This is the real Seraphina, the most gifted and famous medium of the Spiritualist Age.”
I thought of the book I had found in the library. “The woman to whom Dickens gave the copy of
A Christmas Carol
?”
“The same,” she said. “That’s why I thought it so remarkable that, of all the books in the library, that’s the one you were drawn to.” She pointed up at the painting. “If you look closer, you’ll recognize him. Second chap from the right.”
I walked a few more steps into the room and squinted up at the painting—it did look like the photographs I had seen of Dickens.
“So, this is Christmastime 1867? Here at Havenwood?”
“It is indeed,” Mrs. Sinclair said. “He came all the way from the East Coast just to see her.”
“But…” I was having trouble formulating my thoughts. I wasn’t familiar with the real Seraphina—I had no idea there
was
a real Seraphina until just now—but I certainly knew the novel of the same name written by Amaris Sinclair. It was about a psychic medium who opens the wrong door to the spirit world, a door she can never close again. It was a dark tale of possession and murder
and sorrow, and it had always reminded me of a variation on the theme of Pandora’s box.
I wondered if that same kind of evil in the novel was let loose here, at Havenwood, in this room, by the real Seraphina. Was that what inspired Mrs. Sinclair to write her most famous book? Was that what I was feeling when I stepped through the door?
As I looked at my twin hanging above the fireplace, a cloak of fear wrapped itself around me, making my skin tingle. I can’t explain exactly why. What is so frightening about resembling a woman in a painting, after all? It’s an oddity, a curiosity, not a nightmare. But something about the way they were all looking at me, coupled with what I had experienced in that room earlier, made me squirm. My breathing became shallow and quick, and my heart began thumping. I felt the fight-or-flight mechanism kicking in again, and
flight
seemed like a very good option. I wanted nothing more than to run away from Havenwood and all the secrets it contained. But I couldn’t very well go running into the snow in my dress and heels. And I had promised Drew I wouldn’t.
All at once, the conversation I had had with Mrs. Sinclair the day before began rapping at the back of my mind. What had she said? That she had an ulterior motive for inviting me to Havenwood? As I stood there with everyone looking from my face to the woman in the painting and back again, I got the terrible feeling that her ulterior motive had something to do with me being a dead ringer for a dead woman.
You knew about this?” I asked Mrs. Sinclair, finally finding my voice. “About how much I resembled this woman in the painting?”
“Of course I knew about it,” she said gently, recognizing, I supposed, the fear welling up in my eyes.
“So, you realized it that first day when you saw me at breakfast?”
She shook her head. “Long before that. The news reports on television, dear. Adrian spotted the resemblance right away.”
I felt a chill, from the inside out. I thought back to the day Adrian appeared on my doorstep. Was this, finally, the reason they had sought me out? This resemblance was the ulterior motive?
Amaris Sinclair sighed, crossing the room to take a seat on one of the sofas.
“I knew this all was going to come out,” she said, shaking her head. “But I didn’t think it would happen so quickly.”
That same cold breeze whooshed around me. And then it was gone.
“So, you saw me on the news and realized I look like this lady in the painting, Seraphina, and that’s why you asked me to come here?”
“Now, Julia,” Adrian said, crossing the room to take my hand. “Don’t make too much of this. You’re getting worked up over something very small.”
I could feel the calmness he was trying to exude. And when
I thought about it rationally, what he said made sense. “It’s just a resemblance to somebody who lived and died more than one hundred years ago,” I said, looking from one to the other of them. I wasn’t sure whom I was trying to convince. “It doesn’t mean anything more than that. It’s just an odd coincidence that doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
Mrs. Sinclair smiled. “Oh, but it does, my dear,” she said. “It does.”
“Mother—” Adrian began.
She waved a hand at him. “I think it’s time she was told.”
She was looking at me but not focusing on me, not really. Her eyes seemed to be seeing something that wasn’t there. I noticed her hands were shaking, and remembered the letter from the psychiatrist I had seen before dinner. I followed her across the room and sat next to her, taking those shaking hands into my own. My skin tingled.
“Please,” I said. “If you have something to tell me, just say it. Whatever it is, it’ll be all right.”
“Your resemblance to her is no coincidence, Julia,” she said. “Seraphina was your great-great-grandmother.”
I stared at her, not knowing quite how to respond to what she had just said to me. Was this an aftereffect of her illness? Was she psychotic? Or was she simply creating fiction, as she had done so often over the years in her novels?
I squeezed her hands. “Mrs. Sinclair, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re mistaken,” I said as gently as I could. “There may be quite a resemblance, but that’s as far as it goes. This woman was not related to me.”
“Oh, but she was.” She nodded. “On your mother’s side.”
My mind raced back to what I knew about my family history. “I’m sorry, but that’s just not right. I hate to disappoint you, but my grandmother was born in a small town in Wisconsin. Her parents were Scandinavian immigrants, like most of the people in that area. Her grandmother wasn’t a famous medium and she certainly wasn’t named Seraphina. Believe me, I would have heard about that.”
I chuckled, looking at each of them in turn. None of them chuckled along with me.
“Family history is all too often revised and rewritten, Julia, especially when strange birds are perched on one’s family tree,” Mrs. Sinclair said.
The look on my face must have told her what I was feeling, because she said, “I can see you’re unconvinced.”
“There’s just no way an exotic psychic who was famous and, I presume, wealthy was my great-great-grandmother. As I told you, my great-grandparents were Scandinavian immigrants. They came to this country to build a better life for themselves and they worked hard at it. They were by no means wealthy, just the opposite. So you see, it’s just not possible that my great-grandmother’s mother was Seraphina.” I gestured toward the painting. “I mean, how could this woman’s daughter have wound up as a poor immigrant eking out a living in rural Wisconsin? You have to see that one and one don’t equal two here.”
Mrs. Sinclair patted my knee before pushing herself up from the sofa where we had been sitting. “You’re looking at this with your rational mind, Julia,” she said, turning on her heel. “Look with your heart, and I think you’ll begin to see things differently.”
A chill crept its way up my spine as I watched her.
She
wants
me to be related to Seraphina despite all the facts I’ve told her to the contrary,
I thought.
Why?
I decided not to push it—Adrian had hired me as a companion for his mother and obviously this sort of behavior was the reason she needed one. I didn’t want to upset her by further denying her theory, so I stayed silent for the moment, looking to Adrian and Drew for support. Perhaps we could forget all about this Seraphina business and go on with our evening.
Mrs. Sinclair opened a drawer on the sideboard and withdrew a manila file folder.
“Adrian did the research before he sought you out, my dear,” she said, handing it to me.
I opened it to find a sheet of paper. On it, a family tree. Mine. All the names were familiar, just as I knew them to be. My name, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. My eyes stung with the memories of those incredibly strong and loving women, now all gone. Had any of them been alive, I would have retreated to the safety of their embrace after the whole business with Jeremy came to light.
I wouldn’t be here right now, at Havenwood. I stared at the tree for a moment, and then looked back at Mrs. Sinclair, confused as to what she was trying to prove by showing this to me.
“This says Juuli Herrala was my great-great-grandmother, just like I told you,” I said, putting the sheet on the table and pointing to her name. “See? It’s right there. I was named after her.”
Mrs. Sinclair nodded. “Exactly my point, dear. Juuli Herrala was Seraphina’s real name.”
I blinked at her several times. “How do you know that?”
“It is a historical fact.”
“Don’t think for a moment that I believe any of what you say is true,” I said, the words catching in the air by a tendril of doubt. “But just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. Seraphina was my great-great-grandmother. How in the world would her descendants wind up in northern Wisconsin scraping by on farms or working in the mines?”
“I don’t know what happened to Seraphina after she left this house. She was lost to history. But I can tell you that what happened to her on that last, terrible night must have frightened her deeply. Deeply enough to cause her to give up her career, drop out of sight, and disappear.” She gave me a wry look. “I know exactly what that feels like, and I dare say you do, too.”
I sighed. She did have a point about that.
“And if she wanted to disappear, to get away from the fame and celebrity that surrounded her, what better place to run to than a rural community populated by those who knew absolutely nothing about her old life?”
I slumped into an armchair. She was describing exactly the same reason I had come to Havenwood.
Still. It seemed as though she had a lot invested in me being this Seraphina’s descendant—it was the very reason she had brought me here. Whether I believed it or not, it occurred to me at that moment that I might do well to play along. My old life was gone. This was my reality now. What might she do if she realized she
was wrong, that I wasn’t Seraphina’s descendant? The psychiatrist’s letter flashed into my mind.
The patient is nonviolent.
Had she been violent? Was that the reason she was institutionalized?
“I can see you’re having trouble with all of this,” Mrs. Sinclair said to me as she reached over and took my hand in hers. “Maybe we’ve had enough talk about Seraphina for one evening, hmm? Let’s have some drinks and talk about something more pleasant.”
They certainly had a way of changing the subject with rapid-fire speed here at Havenwood, I thought, as Adrian poured another drink and began talking about whether it was supposed to snow that evening. As I looked from one person to the next, it occurred to me that we were all hiding something. Adrian and Drew didn’t want Mrs. Sinclair to know about our “visitor.” I didn’t want any of them to know about my hallucinations. And Mrs. Sinclair was probably hiding the most of us all.
Havenwood was indeed a den of secrets, I thought as I sipped my drink. I wondered what else was lurking just out of sight.
I retreated to my room shortly after that. I had no wish to drink as much as we all did the night before, and I was equally unwilling to broach the Seraphina subject again. I felt like one of those “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” monkeys. If she was my ancestor, and if that was the reason Adrian brought me here, I didn’t want to know about it, at least not right then.
As I undressed, I thought about the strange dichotomy that was Havenwood. At once it felt safe and welcoming, and at the same time, there was an undercurrent of—what? Malice? Danger? Fear?—bubbling just below the surface. Yes, I was free to leave. I could’ve bundled up and had Drew take me away at that very moment… but the very thought of it made me shiver. God only knows what we’d encounter out there in the dark night in those millions of acres of wilderness. Mountain lions. Wolves. The person who had spied on us the night before. That was
real
danger. But here, beyond the eccentricities of a strange and potentially insane old lady? I might be imagining it all. Paintings coming to life, floating apparitions, party-going girls from the past back to try on dresses—all of it, every last thing, might be brought on by drug withdrawal. And what if it wasn’t? A couple of giggling ghosts of society girls in taffeta weren’t exactly the great undead. What was the worst they could do? Spill champagne on me? Hide my pearls?
I realized, as I hung the dress up carefully in the closet, slipped the shoes back into place, and returned the necklace and earrings
to the jewelry box where I had found them, that I didn’t want to leave Havenwood, not really. I had already become quite fond of Mrs. Sinclair and her velour jogging suits and gotten used to the rhythm of life here. The horses. The dogs. It all felt right somehow. And further, it felt as though I had been here not just a few days, but forever, that my place at this table had been set long ago.
It was like my old life had dissipated into my distant past. Shopping on Michigan Avenue seemed as long ago and far away as my childhood.
I was pulling on my pajamas when I heard a scratching at my door. What was this? Another hallucination?
It was light at first, then louder. And then a low bark. I opened the door a crack to find all three dogs standing there, tails up, ears perked. I opened the door wider, and they filed into my room and paced about, sniffing here and there, before turning in circles a few times and laying down in front of the fireplace, tails wrapped around their snouts.
“It looks like you’re in for the night,” I said to them, shutting the door behind me.
The dogs looked enormous in this setting—seeing them outside with the backdrop of the vast wilderness was one thing, but here, I got the full image of just how big they actually were. I moved carefully around them to the bathroom, where I washed my face and brushed my teeth.
“You might want water,” I said aloud, peering out the door into my room at the sleeping giants. I looked under the vanity and found a large plastic basin, which I rinsed out and filled from the cold water tap and set onto the tiled floor, figuring the dogs would find it if they wanted it.
I made my way back across the room, stepping gingerly over the dogs, and turned out the light before slipping under the covers. Just as my head hit the pillow, Molly, the red dog that had greeted me so enthusiastically in the field, jumped onto the bed, turned in a circle a few times, and curled up next to me. I held my breath, not
knowing quite what to do: Could I move? What if I nudged her in my sleep? But soon, the slow, steady rhythm of her breathing calmed me, and I drifted off to sleep feeling safer than I ever had.
My dreams that night were convoluted and eerie. I vaguely remembered the dogs growling low and steady at something floating in the corner of my room—the little girl I had seen?—but my limbs felt like deadweight and my eyes felt so heavy that I couldn’t move to get away. That, too, may have been a dream.
Whatever it was, I awoke the next morning refreshed and full of energy, if somewhat perplexed to see that the dogs were nowhere to be seen. Had the omnipresent Marion let them out of my room? I wasn’t sure.
I padded over to the window and opened the curtains to find a fury of white outside. A real Minnesota blizzard! I hadn’t seen one of those since I left home years before. It evoked such a sweet sense of nostalgia that I thought my heart would burst from the joy of it. When I was a child and a blizzard descended, school would be canceled and we’d have a snow day. This was a more exciting treat than even Christmas morning. We couldn’t wait for the snow to finally stop so we could burst out into the cold to build elaborate forts inside the drifts, have endless snowball fights, or simply fall backward and extend our arms and legs to make perfect snow angels, before rushing inside, faces red and stinging from the cold, for tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, which we gobbled up in front of the television. I don’t know how long I stood there, those sweet days of childhood swirling around me as furiously as the snow outside.
As I headed down the grand staircase toward breakfast, buoyed by my memories, a resolution hit me, growing stronger with each step I took. Strange visions notwithstanding, I liked it here at Havenwood. I didn’t want to leave. But I needed to resolve this sinister undercurrent—or what I
thought
was a sinister undercurrent. And that meant I had to get to the bottom of Mrs. Sinclair’s ulterior motive for bringing me here.