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Beatrix turned on her heel, and Martin reached out to grab her wrist, clutching the air.
“Beatrix, please, be reasonable!”
“Reason left when you made me your mistress, and I buried our son alone!” Beatrix howled. She made her way down the craggy hill toward the shoreline.
“Beatrix, please,” he begged.
She turned around to face him.“You’re a monster,” she hissed.
Martin held her bony shoulders,“I’m not!” he yelled, shoving her back with the force of his anger.
Her heel slipped against the slick terrain. She stumbled backward.
Martin’s mouth hung open in horror as he watched as the woman he once loved tumbled back, slicing her head open on a jagged rock.
Martin stood, in shock, over Beatrix’s cowering body. He felt the rock, slick with her blood and the cold rain. He then knelt to her body, searching desperately for a pulse. He found none.
Instead, his heart started to pound, ramming frantically against his chest as if trying to escape. His heartbeat formed a chorus: repent, repent, repent. Beatrix was right. He was a terrible man.
But Martin's moral character notwithstanding, he couldn't leave her there. He couldn't bury her either. He saw the ocean lapping at the shore, and he knew what he had to do.
Martin's body racked with sobs as he dragged her limp body out into the ocean, telling himself that scorned lovers drowned all the time.
Chapter 1
Eleanor
It’sneveragoodsign when the cab driver looks alarmed.
“Idylewylde Hall? Are you sure?” he asks for the millionth time. The bushy mustache on his upper lip reminds me of a walrus, and his eyebrows creep alarmingly close to his hairline.
“Yep. I start working there on Monday. I’m the new archivist for the community outreach project,” I explain as I heaved my suitcase into the trunk of the bright yellow cab.
There is no cell service on Weatherby Island. I found that out the hard way after I hauled my suitcase up the beach to the ferry’s office where the gentle receptionist called me a cab on what looked like a rotary phone.
Weatherby Island is located on the northernmost tip of Washington. Calling it isolated feels generous.
With roughly six hundred permanent residents and access to the mainland provided by a janky ferry, locals don’t take kindly to newcomers, especially those who have been hired to investigate the “cursed” crumbling manor that once belonged to the town’s founder: Martin Idylewylde.
The cab driver glances at me from the mirror. “So, you’re the new gal the library hired to dig through that nightmare of an attic?”
“Technically, I’m here to find any pertinent documents relating to the town’s founding that may be in the Idylewylde’s possession—but yes.”
“Well, God help you,” the cab driver declares.
“It’s not that bad, is it?” I ask.
I applied for the archival job on a whim. Even though I graduated top of my class with my Masters in Archives and Preservation from Rutgers a year ago, I struggled to find a job after I graduated. It turns out Portland has an excess of competent librarians.
When I found the job posting for the Idylewylde Hall archives, it sounded like a dream. For six months, I’d split my time between on-site research and working as a collection assistant in the library’s local history archives.
Iphigenia Idylewylde, widow to the founder’s great-great-grandson, still lives at the hall and is ecstatic to provide me with free room and board.
Combine that with the generous stipend provided by the Idylewylde Foundation, and I was about to stumble into more money than I’d ever had in my entire life. It sounded too good to be true.
According to the locals, Idylewylde Hall is cursed.
“I’ve seen her,” the cab driver mumbles.
