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7
Cilla
I walk into the blue bedroom and don’t turn around when the door closes behind me. I have too much on my mind and I know the man will stand guard outside. I know I won’t be allowed out until Kill comes for me. But for right now, that’s okay. I need to process what’s happened. Who I’m dealing with. Because I’ve just realized who he is.
I go to one of the three windows lining the walls and push it open. My room overlooks the back of the property. I know the layout of the house. I’ve studied the design. Was obsessed with it for a time.
I leave the window open even though it’s cold out because the room has a smell to it. The whole house does. It’s like the stain of the past. Of secrets being locked away for too long. It’s stale and decrepit even though the mansion is in excellent condition. I try to imagine what it must cost to maintain it. Wonder how often Kill comes here. It’s a hell of a weekend getaway.
Keeping my coat on, I let fresh, cold air into the bedroom and look around. The Persian carpet is slightly worn but in good condition, and pretty. A light blue with elaborate, beautiful patterns along the four corners. I go to the bed, pull back the duvet, and sit. It’s much more comfortable than I expect it to be, but the mattress is new, even though I can tell the bed is an antique. It has four posts and a canopy over the head. I smell the comforter, the pillow. They don’t smell like the room. These are new.
I open the single drawer in the nightstand and a pencil rolls forward. It’s kind of creepy, the sound. I pick it up. It’s only about three inches long and the eraser has been chewed on. I wonder about the person who did that. If it was her. Kill’s sister, Virginia. Ginny for short. I put it back and close it.
There are two doors and I open the first one to find a bathroom. It’s large and luxurious, although the fixtures are old. Fresh towels are stacked on a shelf with bottles of shampoo, conditioner, soap, and anything I could ask for, really. I recognize the brands too. Nothing I can usually afford to buy.
Back in the bedroom, I open the other door and a light goes on. It’s a large walk-in closet. And it’s stocked. Hanging on a rack are too many dresses for me to count. Shoes are lined neatly on shelves along another wall and the drawers are filled with jeans, sweaters, shirts, belts, underthings. I check the labels. Look at the tags. Everything is new and everything is my size.
I step back, confused. There are more clothes here than in my closet at home.
Back in the bedroom, I pull my coat tight around me as a gust of cold wind blows in rain and a few yellowed leaves from the tree outside. I go to it, let my face get wet as I survey the property. It’s vast, although needs maintaining. Everything is overgrown and melds into the thick cropping of trees at the far end. The pool is unprotected. The tarp is torn and weather-worn. Leaves lie inside, rotting in stagnant rain water. The abandoned feel of the place gives me a chill and I draw the window closed. I lean my back against the wall, hugging my arms to myself.
I wonder why he brought me here.
It’s all coming together now. Who he is. What this place is.
About two years ago, I’d done a story on haunted mansions in the northeast for a Halloween ghost story. Rockcliffe had become the headliner of my piece with not one ghost but two.
Earlier, when the doctor had called Kill by his last name, it wasn’t that I recognized it, but it had jogged something in my brain. Kill. Mr. Killian. Mr. Black. Kill is Killian Black. His family is notorious. His father and uncle were both criminals with ties to the mafia. Killian now runs Mea Culpa, a high end gentlemen’s club, essentially a strip club for the elite, which I was sure was used as a front to launder money. That’s where I must have been yesterday, where they’d taken Jones and me. That would explain the music. And why no one cared that I was being led out so obviously against my will.
The only photographs I had ever seen of Kill when I’d found the house and my interest had been piqued had been taken when he wasn’t quite eighteen. The way he looked then versus the way he looks now, you wouldn’t say it was the same person.
Although, the piece I wrote was essentially fiction but for a handful of facts, when I’d been researching Rockcliffe House, I learned about the Black family’s tragic history. Killian’s father and uncle had been enemies, but when his father had died, his uncle had been granted custody of him and Ginny. Kill would have been sixteen at the time and Ginny fifteen. The tragedy had come almost two years later when, in the same week, Kill’s sister hanged herself in the barn which had been partially converted into a greenhouse on the property, and his uncle had been found brutally murdered. The shock had come when Killian had been arrested for his uncle’s murder. He’d been two weeks’ shy of his eighteenth birthday, and was tried as an adult, sentenced to a twenty-four year prison term.
