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“Who? Iphigenia? She seems lovely. I had to teach her how to use Zoom, but she gave me a tour the other day.”
“No.” The cab driver’s eyes darken. “Beatrix. I’ve seen her walking the shore. I was driving someone back from Seattle one night; it was like one in the morning and all of a sudden, we saw this lady looking haggard and stumbling up the beach. Her hair’s wet. Her dress is water-logged. She’s screaming. We’re talking bone-chilling screams. The kind of noises someone makes when they’re about to die.”
I don’t believe in curses.
Do I believe that, as an isolated community, Weatherby Island developed its own complex belief system? Yes.
Do I believe that Martin Idylewylde knocked up a stable girl before his wife was supposed to get there? Yes.
My new boss emailed me a scan of the original ferry log from that day. What I don’t believe is that Beatrix, the servant in question, “went mad with grief” after she miscarried and drowned herself on the beach—a beach that she now haunts, when she’s not terrorizing the residents of Idylewylde Hall. At best, I believe Beatrix was a young woman who was preyed upon by her older employer and maybe had a case of Postpartum Depression.
Still, there’s something about the cab driver’s tone that shoots a chill up my spine.
“I mean, how late were you working that night? Were you sleep-deprived?”
He shakes his head vehemently as we round a corner. The roads on the island are narrow. They can barely fit two lanes worth of traffic.
“No, I was working the night shift. I’d only started an hour before. And we went to check it out; we went down onto the beach and everything. I saw her. I could see the seaweed clinging to her shoulders. I could smell her. She smelled like moss and wet sand, and when I reached out to touch her, she vanished.”
“People don’t vanish,” I hedge.
He nods. “You’re right. People don’t vanish, but ghosts do.”
I wonder if he’s been practicing that line. I decided to drop the subject and observe the scenery outside. Weatherby is beautiful, surrounded by lush and verdant forests and plant life. The cab driver slows as we wind our way up a mountain. I peer out onto the shore below us, wondering about Beatrix despite my skepticism.
Above us, the sky looks gloomy and gray. The clouds are heavy with rain; moments later, they break, unleashing a torrent of rain. The cab driver turns on the windshield wipers. I let the sound of the wipers beating back and forth lull me into a contemplative state, but I still have questions.
“Okay, Beatrix notwithstanding, do you believe the Idylewylde's are cursed?” I ask.
The Idylewylde's have a Kennedy-sized Mountain of misfortune attached to their family history. After Martin and Beatrix’s disastrous fling, Martin’s wife Adelaide died from cholera five years later. On the tenth anniversary of Beatrix’s death, January 4, 1845, a servant knocked an oil lamp over, setting a fire that scorched the first two floors of the house.
Once the house was rebuilt, a bevy of the Idylewylde’s succumbed to Influenza, then they invested in stocks the week before the Great Depression and made every subsequent bad move throughout history until today. The sheer volume of their misfortune is staggering, and I have to wonder if something greater is at play.
The cab driver exhales. “Here’s the thing about a curse: I think whether you believe in it or not, it is something that happens to you.” He pulls up into a twisting gravel driveway.
I can barely make out the silhouette of the hall: three sprawling, ramshackle floors reaching a peak like the craggy mountains behind them. The front half of the house is supported by two marble pillars, but the paint’s chipping. The cab driver exits the cab and opens my door for me. I step out and hug my jacket closer to my body.
Idylewylde Hall is still impressive, even if it’s a shell of its former glory. I note the moss-covered angel in the fountain next to the cab and the stained-glass windows near the attic. It feels stately and historic, the sort of place that’s a breeding ground for legends.
The cab driver handed me my suitcase. “Good luck,” he says.
I drag my suitcase behind me and up the front porch steps. I grab the door knocker, which rests in the nostrils of an iron bull, and pound. “BAM!” My knock reverberates, shaking the knocker in my hand.
The door swings open, and Iphigenia appears.
“Eleanor! Welcome!” she gushes. Her voice is thin and trembling. She’s wearing a black turtleneck and a black ankle-length skirt even though it’s August. She’s so pale, she’s almost translucent. I can see the blue veins along her cheekbones. Her wispy silver hair rests in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are ice blue. Something is piercing about them like she can look at me and see every bad thing I’ve ever done. When she levels her gaze at me, I want to confess.
“Did you find the place okay?” she asks.
“Yeah, it was a bit of a struggle realizing you don’t do ride-shares here.”
Iphigenia steps aside so I can drag my suitcase into the foyer.
“What?”
“Rideshares. You know—Uber, Lyft,” I try and explain. Iphigenia is eighty-three. I doubt she has a smartphone.
“Oh! You know, I’m not the tech-savvy one in the family. That’s Joseph’s job. You’ll meet him soon enough.”
