A Murder at Alcott Manor Page 2

  Peyton’s sigh was loud over the phone, and Layla could feel her sister’s anger seethe. Peyton hated Asher.

  “We’ll figure this out. I’m on my way. Where are you right now?”

  “Going to meet Tom Watson at the manor. Need to get myself together first.” Layla thought of Tom, how kind and dedicated he was to their family and to their ancestral home. He worked for the Historic District Commission, but he had championed the completion of the restoration for several years now. Thanks to him, they were closer than they ever had been.

  “Layla, I know this problem seems insurmountable right now, but remember you’re stronger than you think.”

  Layla nodded and tried to take in her sister’s encouragement. “Paying down that debt will be like a monthly payment for two mortgages. How in the hell am I going to afford that and keep a home for the girls and send them to college? How will I ever be able to retire?”

  “Listen, honey. You of all people in the world deserve happiness. So, this is going to work out.”

  She wanted to believe her sister. Peyton had been blessed with courage to spare, and intelligence that catapulted her out of their hometown and away from their mother. Her determination was the gift that kept on giving, and Layla had never stopped wishing that she could have just a fraction of her sister’s fearlessness. She started the engine and hoped that the drive to Alcott Manor would give her a fresh perspective.

  “You’ve got the stock in the manor. That will pay off for you when the tours begin.”

  “The manor’s a wreck. It might take a year or more for them to finish the repairs in that place.”

  “Why don’t I meet you at the manor? I’m about forty-five minutes out,” Peyton said.

  Layla pressed the gas pedal. “I’ll drive over to the public park and walk along the sand to the back of the house. Maybe we’ll get there around the same time.”

  Layla’s mind filled with sandy barefoot memories of her and her sister racing along the beach hand-in-hand and overflowing with giggles. It almost hurt to think of them, those far away good times.

  “I’m on my way, Layla-pop.”

  Layla’s heart softened for a twinkle of a moment at the sound of her childhood nickname. She could almost taste the sour apple lollipop she usually had in her mouth as a child. In the next second, she toughened up. She had to—she was headed toward Alcott Manor.

  2

  Asher Cardill walked across the great hall and beneath the wide second story balcony where he had fallen to his death.

  He watched Tom Watson and Mason Holloway while they met for their daily progress meeting on the manor. Mason was the newest builder to take on the manor’s restorations, and it was obvious that he had no idea what he was getting into.

  The two men inspected nearly everything in the room, from the oversized crystal chandelier, to the near-perfection of the gold paint, to the intricate balusters along the grand staircase that were being restored to their original design. Now they gathered around a mysterious spot on the floorboards, one that evoked bad memories and sent a cold sweat over Asher’s skin.

  Both men missed the fact that Asher paced to the outside of their meeting. If the house had been quiet, they might have heard his footsteps. But on this morning, Alcott Manor was filled with the construction noises of hammers banging, saws whirring, and men yelling, so they didn’t notice him.

  Asher rather liked it that way.

  “It’s disturbing,” Mason said. “Every board within eight feet of where Asher died was completely replaced last week. These stains shouldn’t be there.”

  Mason had a long history in Charleston where he had been born and raised, but he was new to the manor, so incidents like this caught him by surprise. It was fun to see him off balance. Because even though it had been ten years since they both graduated from high school, the unvoiced rivalry between Asher and Mason still ran strong.

  Looks, women, money, success—those were the playing fields where they competed. Alcott Manor was their newest and final arena, where they would fight to the death to win one last prize—Layla Alcott. He knew that Mason couldn’t possibly top his plans to win her. He had taken Layla away from him once before, and he was about to do it again. Seeing Mason lose this final round was something Asher would enjoy, maybe more than life itself.

  He watched Tom squat near the wide dark stain and he chuckled at how little the two men knew about the manor’s secrets. The reappearance of a blood stain should be the least of their concerns. Tom had worked at restoring the manor for years and though he knew more about its history than most, he still didn’t know the half of what really went on around them.

  Tom studied the area, then pressed two fingers into the shadowy marks. “It’s sticky like blood. Smells like it, too.”

  “Can’t be blood, there’s too much of it,” Mason said. “Has to be something else.”

  “The manor has a dark history that it can’t let go of.” He showed Mason his fingertips which had blotches of red smudged on them.

  “Houses don’t feel. And that mess could be anything.”

  Tom clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Alcott Manor isn’t a normal house. I warned you about that when you took this job. It doesn’t let go of much, if anything. More time you spend around here, the more you’ll see I’m right.” He wiped the blood from his hand with a blue patterned handkerchief and squinted at the walls as though their ornamental beauty hid something dark and slithering. As if those walls filled to overflowing with an unseen dark energy and he couldn’t protect himself.

  “Be careful in the manor, nothing here is as it seems. I’ve had enough strange experiences in this place to know that this spot isn’t just a stain. It’s a sign. The manor is giving us notice of what’s to come.”

  “I don’t believe in any of that stuff. One of the workers probably spilled some paint, could even be food.” Mason rested his hands on his hips and looked unimpressed.

  A whiter shade of pale shifted across Tom’s face and he rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “People have lost their fortunes and their lives by underestimating this place. I would caution you against making the same mistake.”

  “So, what’s this a sign of? Another death? The evil house takes another soul or something like that?”

  Asher watched Mason chuckle.

  “Hope not.” Tom’s broad shoulders seemed to drop slightly. “Right now, you need to think about how Layla will react when she sees this. She’ll think we haven’t cleaned up this mess since her ex-husband died here. She’s the major shareholder in the family-owned business that runs this place. The one we need to keep happy, the one with all the influence.”

  Mason ran a hand over his face that was beginning to show signs of worry and fatigue. The job wasn’t going as smoothly as he’d planned. Plus, he’d arrived at four-thirty that morning.

  “Yeah, I remember. When is she coming?”

  Tom glanced at his wristwatch. “About an hour. I’d tell you to throw a rug over this for the short-term, but the house will soil that, too. Get wood that’s fresh from another location, none that’s even been on this property. Trust me on that.”

  “We have a lumber delivery coming in later this morning. I’ll have somebody tear this out in the meantime.”

  Asher watched Mason take his phone from his pocket and began to text while he walked away.

  “Mason,” Tom gestured to the stained flooring. “Once you get this wood out, burn it.”

  Mason shook his head as though he’d just been asked to do the ridiculous.

  When the two men left, Asher walked around his death site that the manor had re-marked. Yes. Now that Layla was coming, this blood was most definitely a sign. Someone else would die and the manor knew. The manor always knew.

  One hour until Layla arrived. Asher couldn’t wait.

  3

  Layla was tired. Down to the marrow of her bones tired. Not just because of the stress, although that was a big part of her f
atigue. She was tired because she hadn’t slept. Because once again, the pattern was starting.

  She’d woken up in the kitchen the night before, standing in front of the open refrigerator. Before she could fully understand where she was, she tasted the sugar-sweet icing from her daughter’s red velvet birthday cake on her tongue. She had no memory of leaving her bed, no memory of walking to the kitchen and no memory of shoving that thick wedge of confectionary joy into her mouth.

  And yet, there she was at two in the morning.

  Sleepwalking.

  Sleep eating.

  That this had happened before was bad enough. That it was happening again troubled her.

  Years ago, a psychologist had told her mother that teasing at school was the root cause of her sleepwalking. Bullying. Layla’s unresolved stress would send her wandering right out into the night in her jammies and usually with a handful of cookies to munch along the way. Neighbors occasionally returned her home, though several times it had been the police.

  Dr. Waters wasn’t as dismayed over her sleepwalking and sleep eating behaviors as her mother. He said he liked that it was Layla’s nature to try to work out her worries at night, and he recommended she learn a technique he used with most of his patients. He called it lucid dreaming.

  “Quite simply, lucid dreaming is your awareness of being in a dream state, while retaining your capacity to make choices. So, if you’ve ever been in a dream and you were aware that you were dreaming—then you have had a lucid dream.

  “As a therapeutic treatment, I will teach you how to recreate your most distressing situations from school and life. You’ll have the opportunity to control the outcome of these situations where typically you may not. You’ll be able to handle conflicts with new strength and new creativity, and the sleep eating and sleepwalking will stop. Your confidence will rise, too.”

  When Dr. Waters began their sessions, he explained, “Dreams are a safe place where you can really let go of your inhibitions. You can sail to the moon on a cloud or run through fire without getting burned. You can even leap over tall buildings or fly with your own wings to Paris for the weekend. You can feel true freedom, maybe for the first time in your life. Most importantly, I’ll teach you how to recreate your problems within the safety of your dream world, and how to respond to that conflict in an empowered way.”

  He taught her how to wake up in her dreams without completely coming awake. With plenty of instruction and lots of practice, she finally got the hang of the process. It was all playtime at first, so she could relax and have fun and learn without pressure. She flew to Paris with her own wings. She swam beneath the ocean and for hours at a time without any scuba equipment—she often imagined herself a mermaid with a long blue green tail. Happily so.

  Then it was time to work on the events that upset her the most. Like when someone harassed and bullied her at school. So, in her lucid dreams, she recreated the situation exactly as it had happened that day, down to the room, the time of day, and her bully, Brooke...only this time around, Layla was strong and confident when Brooke tried to humiliate her. Layla had witty and eloquent comebacks that left Brooke dumfounded and even apologetic.

  Just as Dr. Waters promised, her personal power began to come back. There were fewer bullying incidents as a result, her stress levels lowered, and her sleep eating and sleepwalking stopped.

  “There are limits to this technique,” Dr. Waters warned. “Time limits with very real consequences. Hard limits. Your spirit actually leaves your body during lucid dreaming, and if your spirit stays away from your body too long, it won’t find its way home. That would leave your body in a coma.”

  Dr. Waters gave her a suggestion to guard against that possibility: "Wear a watch and check the time before you fall asleep. It may sound silly, but many of your waking world details will cross over into your lucid dream. Awareness of time can be one of them and you can use that to your advantage. When you wake up in your dream, check the time again. You need to force yourself to wake up before the three-hour mark.”

  “I can force myself to wake up?” she asked.

  “Yes. You can wake yourself up with a firm intent. As long as your body isn’t too tired, that is. In a lucid dream your body is sleeping. So, if your body is overly tired or fatigued, then you might not be able to wake yourself up as quickly as you would like. Don’t wait until the last minute.”

  She hadn’t used her lucid dreaming for a while, but now her physical and emotional exhaustion were catching up with her again. She needed a few minutes to recover from her morning, a lucid dream to tamp down the stress. She was early for her appointment with Tom and to meet Peyton, so she parked in the lot of a small county-run beach that was just below the Alcott property line. The manor was situated on sixty-five acres, almost an hour south of Charleston and along the coast.

  With a glance toward Alcott Manor, she wondered if it were far enough away. Because usually, her lucid dreams were simply dreams. Beautiful, charmed experiences that healed like nothing else. But the manor had a dark history all its own that affected people’s lives. Once, when she had fallen asleep close to the manor, something horrible happened. Something that destroyed her plans for a future with Mason. Something that changed her life forever.

  She searched the horizon but the manor wasn’t in sight. She wasn’t even on Alcott property. She was fine, she reassured herself. Perfectly fine.

  The warm sun heated the interior of her car. Layla opened her eyes and checked her watch, then continued her deep breathing, just as Dr. Waters had taught her: inhaling white sparkling light, allowing it to fill the inside of her body, then exhaling dark smoke. Drifting further and further into the dream space, the other world where she felt most at home. Remembering his suggestions, following the path that was now familiar and well worn, deeper and deeper into her intent to recreate her morning, albeit with a different outcome this time.

  A few breaths later, she opened her eyes and found herself just as she had intended to be: in her lucid dream, sitting in her attorney’s office, at the highly polished desk with Billy across from her, folders and papers in front of him. He was giving her the bad news: that Asher had cancelled his insurance policy, hers had been increased, and she had to pay off Asher’s bank debt. She noticed the several subtle clues that Dr. Waters had taught her to see. A tingly, electric feeling at her fingertips, a slight out-of-body sensation, and on occasion, image trails that followed certain movements.

  She breathed deeply once again and prepared herself to respond differently this time. She would not get overwhelmed; instead, she would sit tall and ask what her options were. Wasn’t there some form of bankruptcy she could file that would protect her? Wouldn’t Billy call the bank again and negotiate something on her behalf?

  She opened her mouth to ask these things with confidence, but a yank to her midsection dragged her ten feet away from her attorney’s desk.

  Billy looked at her wide-eyed and wondering, his mouth open and speechless.

  Was she waking up already? Surely not yet. She’d only just begun.

  She shook her head and cleared her throat. “Sorry. Not sure what that was.” She scooted her chair toward the desk again, and she felt a warning: a tingling in her stomach where she had just been pulled, where something had a grip.

  Like a giant fist, it quickly tightened and yanked her into the air this time, beyond the back wall and out of the office altogether. When she landed on her rear, it was in the one place she had spent most of the last ten years avoiding: Alcott Manor. She looked around the 1880s-style kitchen that boasted open shelves and light wood work tables in place of modern-day cabinets and countertops.

  She grabbed ahold of the long rectangular table in the middle of the floor, her heart thumping hard, and her breath struggled to keep up. An older heavy-set woman in a frilly white apron chopped carrots, using the table as a cutting board.

  Her spirit had been taken into the manor. This wasn’t the same living space in the manor that o
ther people could see. She knew this because the manor had brought her to this particular place during one of her lucid dreams before, a long time ago.

  There were signs. Specific characteristics that she remembered and that were also here today. Like the air. In this part of the manor, it was quiet and thick on her skin—an inside-the-terrarium-like stillness. No breeze, no circulation. It was like a dead zone.

  The screen door shut with a squeak and a slam—the sound of a well-loved home. Three blonde girls in bow-tied pigtails and red smocked dresses giggled and squealed and chased a brown terrier puppy with a red ball in its mouth. A tiny bell jingled on the dog’s red collar. She leaned out of the way and watched them disappear around the corner.

  That’s the way it was in this dead zone. People and things from a different era appeared and disappeared. They passed through as if they were unaware that they belonged somewhere else. Like she did. They were all here for a moment, while their beginnings and endings were someplace else.

  A microwave sat on a table at the other end of the room, as well as a coffeemaker—two signs that the present wasn’t too far away.

  This place gave her a strange feeling of being neither here nor there, as if she had left the present but wasn’t quite anywhere else either. Not the past, not the future. Just sort of hovering in the middle somewhere. Some place in time that only the manor could know. It was just like this house to have a toehold in some sort of a netherworld.

  Perched on an antique pedestal cake stand and on top of a white cloth doily was a thickly iced, double-layer chocolate cake. Obviously homemade and already carved into substantial pieces, Layla’s mouth watered. Cake was still her favorite security blanket, and without thinking twice, she helped herself. She had lost a substantial amount of weight in the last few years and sworn off sugar, but she didn’t have to count calories in a dream. Three large crumbs spilled onto the smooth wooden surface of the table and she left them. She didn’t have to clean in a dream either.