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“Well?” the shrink asked, looking at her expectantly.
“Sounds like a great idea, Doc,” Jonny said. He grabbed Pandy’s hand and gave it a good, hard squeeze, like the two of them were teammates.
And that was how they ended up in Wallis, on the trip that Henry would later dub “Helter-Skelter.” As in, “That Helter-Skelter weekend when you tried to kill Jonny.”
“I did not try to kill Jonny!” Pandy exploded.
But oh, how she would come to wish she had.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE NIGHT before the trip to Wallis, Jonny returned from Vegas in a bad mood.
He was still in a bad mood the next morning, complaining that his back hurt. During the two-hour drive, he kept shifting in his seat. When Pandy asked if he wanted her to drive instead, he snapped, “Do you want to take that over, too?”
She kept her mouth shut and prayed the weekend wouldn’t be a disaster. And it wasn’t just because of Jonny. It was nerve-racking for her to bring anyone to Wallis. As Henry always pointed out, “Wallis House makes people act strange.” Henry was her only frequent guest.
Wallis House was “complicated.”
Indeed, it wasn’t a house at all, but a mansion. A rare, once-famous Italianate Victorian built on the top of a two-hundred-acre mountain. It featured a clay tennis court, a stream-fed marble pool, a carriage house big enough to hold a basketball court, and—because Old Jay, the ancestor who had built the house, had also been eccentric—an actual Victorian theater where he and his New York friends had staged plays.
According to the photos, from 1882, when the mansion was completed, to 1929, when the stock market crashed, the house had been a real showplace. Unfortunately, it had gone steadily downhill from there. Passed from one generation to another, with each descendant wanting it less and less. It was what was known as a white elephant: too costly to maintain, too expensive to renovate; located in an area too remote and inconvenient to entice a buyer. When she and Hellenor were growing up, it had been an embarrassing wreck, with peeling paint, doors that barely opened, and missing floorboards. The plumbing clogged on a regular basis, the electricity was unreliable at best, and the house was filled with a million dusty family heirlooms.
When Pandy was living there people insisted the place was haunted, and the family who lived there was suspect. The two Wallis girls were teased and bullied mercilessly, pa
rtly due to the house and partly due to the fact that they were weird kids who didn’t fit in. Someone once took Hellenor’s clothes from her gym locker and tried to flush them down the toilet because they were “ugly.” Pandy’s moniker was “Devil Spawn.” Together, the two Wallis girls were known as “the Cootie Kids.” Unlike some of the other taunts, this was usually said to their faces.
“‘Cootie. A slang word of indeterminate origin believed to have originated with soldiers. Also, referring to lice,’” Hellenor had read from the dictionary.
When their parents had died, Pandy and Hellenor had inherited the house. Like generations of Wallises before her, Hellenor hadn’t wanted it, and she had run off to Amsterdam.
The mansion had continued to languish and decay, until Monica came along. And then, with Henry’s guidance—Henry having a deep love for storied historic homes—Pandy had begun to fix up the place. The result was a perfect rendition of what the house had been more than a hundred years ago—replete with the same lousy plumbing and electricity, and a million other inconveniences unimaginable to guests of today. Such as the fact that there was only enough hot water to fill one bathtub. Per day. And yet, from the outside, it appeared cosmetically perfect.
Sort of like Monica, Pandy now thought. People looked at the house and assumed she was amazingly rich, when the reality was that when she had actually lived there, she’d been pathetically poor.
And so, while she remained the same, when people saw the house now, they reacted a heck of a lot differently than they had when she and Hellenor were kids.
It was just this sort of reaction that she was worried about with Jonny.
* * *
“You’re kidding me, right?” he asked, annoyed, when they finally reached the “town” of Wallis, Connecticut—consisting of a gas station, a general store, and three churches.
When he was forced to maneuver the car up the rutted dirt track known as Wallis Road, Pandy suspected he was on the verge of killing her.
But Jonny’s mood began to change as they proceeded up the mile-long driveway that ran under the linked branches of ancient maple trees. Seeing his eyes widen as they passed the old stables and the carriage house, Pandy felt that familiar sense of trepidation. She should have brought him here sooner. Or at least explained the situation to him. But she’d been so caught up in being married to him, she’d “forgotten” about her past.
It hadn’t seemed relevant. Or rather, it hadn’t seemed relevant because she was afraid that Jonny wouldn’t understand.
The driveway wound past the lovely filigreed boathouse perched on the edge of the lake—and there it was, rising up from the top of the green mountain like a white castle in a child’s picture book: Wallis House.
Jonny stomped the brake so hard, Pandy nearly hit the dashboard. He turned and stared at her accusingly, as if to say, Why didn’t you tell me you were rich?
Pandy had seen it happen a million times. She cautioned him the same way she warned everyone who came to Wallis House: “It’s not what it seems.”
Pandy got out of the car and went into the house.
And then, momentarily forgetting about Jonny, Pandy did what she always did when she entered: She walked across the black-and-white checkerboard marble floor, passed underneath a crystal chandelier the size of a small planet, and strode between the flaring flanks of the grand staircase to the grandfather clock. She opened the cabinet and wound the key.
