The Haunting of Alcott Manor, page 16
part #1 of Alcott Manor Series
“We ought to put a couple of love seats along the path, so people will linger in the area. Maybe someone will propose to the love of their life here.”
“And eventually the energy of the land will become transformed?”
“Well, I’ll do a little work on the land first, to remove the negative imprints. Then, yes. Good experiences will build upon what I’ve done. It can take time, but it will happen.”
“How much time?” His eyes squinted with doubt.
“Varies. You'll notice an immediate difference as soon as I remove the old energy. The full transformation takes as long as it takes. The land has to absorb newer, far more positive experiences. We want it to let go of the past completely and move forward. We need to get a few people out here once the gardens are set. Maybe a community event to encourage that positive transformation.”
His wide-set eyes held steady on her. “I don’t see how land can absorb or let go of anything. It doesn’t feel or think.”
“Well, the words ‘let go’ might not be right. But the phrase ‘move forward’ definitely is. The positive experiences are the fuel that’s needed to do that. It builds upon itself and takes on its own momentum.”
He took one final step and touched his lips to hers, gentle and sure. She thought she felt a shift beneath her feet. From the heavy, thick vibe she’d noticed when they first came outside to something lighter. It was…happiness. Yes, that was it. A moving forward. A letting go of what was. Perhaps those were the right words after all.
“Maybe I do get the value of this.” He pulled her flush against him, and her arms wrapped around him to hold on, to move forward. His kiss was long and slow, the thrust of his tongue sweeping across her own, cherishing her, wanting her. She no longer noticed her feet against the ground. There was only him, the way he touched her, and the way he made her feel.
Her long-held ideals about professionalism on the job nudged her. Last thing she wanted was for someone to see them together. “I should get on with my work,” she said, and he finally let her go.
“Be careful.” He raised a cautionary eyebrow.
“It will only help.” This she could do. Easily. She was excited for him to experience the results.
When he headed toward the house, her heart fluttered and leaped at the way he carried himself, at the man she was discovering him to be. Her teeth dragged her bottom lip to meet her tongue, and she savored the last traces of his earthy flavor.
It was twelve more steps until he disappeared into the house. Roughly the same number of hours that stood between them, until she could be with him again, skin to skin, amidst the tangle of blankets and the warmth of the fire.
If Tom ever found out, he’d have a fit. Worse, he’d tell her father. That would leave a heavy black mark on their relationship. Gad. She’d have to be more careful in public.
When she was certain he was gone, she knelt beside the area where the blood had bubbled to the surface. A flutter of adrenaline traveled through her stomach. There was a lot riding on the effects of this clearing.
She checked the area to make sure no one was around. She wasn't fond of having to explain her actions. When she knew the coast was clear, she closed her eyes for a few deep breaths and centered her mind into a neutral space to do her work.
With open palms, she ran her hands just above the land until she had a bead on the thick and haunting memories, the tragic imprints of Anna’s death lodged within the land.
She chanted low and soft. “Hey oh ah, hey oh ah, hey oh ah ay ah ha, hey oh ah, hey oh ah, hey oh ah ay ah ha.” She continued the ancient call of purification until dense black threads lifted from the earth like spiraling smoke.
With her right hand, she twisted the slithering black cords around her hand, pulling them from the depths of their attachment.
Her left hand raised to the heavens and waved to the beat of her chant in a figure eight pattern, searching for the white energy she wanted. When she finally found it, she fisted it quickly as if it was her unwilling captive. It burned and crackled in her palm, stinging and burning her skin while it built in strength like flames from above.
When she couldn’t hold it any longer, she threw it into the ground, and a white fire burned next to her. She watched it to make certain it would hold, her left hand remained steady in the air to guard it. The acrid scent of burning twigs and leaves spun on the ocean breeze.
“Hey oh ah,” she chanted. The energy of the blackened imprints balled around her fist like a thick glove. She flung it into the white fire, and the flames raged when they devoured the energy that had been trapped in the land.
Her chant coaxed the angry scars from the land until none were left to rise to the call of her voice. When the last ones pulled free, she flung them into the hungry flames that leaped for the dark, wriggling mass. With a wave of her left hand, she sent the fire skyward. A flash of lightning covered the sky just before the thunder rolled.
She inhaled the clean electric scent left in the air, measured the energy of the land with both palms close to the ground, then smiled with satisfaction at what she found. “It’s empty.”
She exhaled the exhaustion she always felt after she cleared a particularly difficult dynamic and set her eyes on the ocean in front of her. There was harmony here now between the land and the sea, between land and man. What she had erased would help Henry and his ancestral home. Benjamin, too. Even if none of them knew it or understood why.
The energetic pattern marked into the land by Anna’s death would no longer draw like experience. It would no longer pulse the song of tragedy like sirens who lured sailors to shipwreck. All that was left to do now was to seed the positive and let it take root.
She stood and stretched in the sea air that was calm now. It was time to find the landscapers who needed to rearrange the rose gardens as she wanted them. With a cautious eye toward the manor, she wondered if the house could sense what she’d just done. If it would mind if her work helped solve the mystery it held within. Or at the very least, if it helped the manor to let go and move forward.
A quick movement from the upstairs window on the right caught her attention. She didn’t see the face of the man who stood there, but a long, black sleeve moved from her view, and a chill gripped her heart.
She spun away from the house. He had seen her and the work she had done. She hoped that whatever his thoughts and feelings on what she was doing, he simply allowed the positive transformation to take place. It needed to.
A sweet scent drifted up from the white flowers on the green bushes that lined the back of the estate. Its perfume calmed her obsessive need to count, her need to find order in the midst of fear and chaos.
It was a familiar flower, one she’d seen somewhere before and recently. She racked her brain to no avail—flowers weren't something she paid too much attention to. But this one was just so familiar. She scanned the back of the estate, looking for clues. Maybe she'd just seen it in a different area on the property. Her sight landed on red roses and purple flowers, and an awareness jolted through her. Every flower in the gardens was also painted by Anna on her headboard.
The green linen book she'd picked up from outside the library popped into her mind. Floriography. She quickly ran to the winter garden and retrieved it, then returned to the garden to research the flowers. Anna had been very deliberate about what she painted, and obviously, in what she planted here, as well. There had to be a reason for it.
She opened the front cover and pressed two fingers against the soft cream page to hold it down. The name Anna Alcott was handwritten in faded blue script on the upper right-hand side of the page.
The binding was mostly separated from the cover, and several of the fabric-soft pages were loose. The copyrighted date was 1837. The book was certainly old and held signs of being well-loved. Certain flower names had been underlined, and some had tiny dots placed next to them. A few others had checkmarks and drawings in the margins.
Throughout the book, there were flower names followed by colors and meanings, and there were hand-painted pictures of individual blooms as well as arrangements.
Each flower, when given as a gift, communicated a specific message. Colors affected the meaning—a yellow carnation meant rejection, whereas a white carnation meant pure love. Arrangements added to the meaning of the message, as baby’s breath incorporated the meaning of innocence or pure of heart, while dill meant lust.
She took the book out back and examined the white flowers on the hedge, remembering how Anna had painted them prominently on her headboard, along with some red tulips. And where else had she seen these?
Right. The growth chart downstairs.
She flipped the pages on her notepad until she found the sketch she'd made of the growth chart Henry had shown her. Then she peeked at the garden. All the same flowers from the chart were in the garden. The rest of the blooms in the garden were painted on Anna's headboard. This had to be meaningful somehow.
First the white flower. Carnation? No, she knew what that was. Camellia? Maybe… She remembered the painted one on the headboard. No, the camellia in the book had yellow in the middle. This one didn’t.
Gardenia.
Finally. That was it.
Her finger trailed to the definition. Secret love or untold love.
Gemma lowered the book to her lap. The entire backyard was lined in gardenias and Anna had painted them on her headboard. A tingling sensation scattered across her back.
Secret love?
She scribbled the flower and its definition in her portfolio.
Next were the blood red tulips. She knew that flower at least, and flipped the pages in the Ts. Red tulip: declaration of love.
These were the same two flowers Anna had chosen for Liz, the youngest child.
Declaration of love, secret love. Maybe Liz—her only girl—was the favorite of all her children, and this was Anna’s secret.
Parents weren’t supposed to have favorites. But the fact that they did was a dark secret that both parents and children alike knew.
George was Gemma’s dad’s favorite. The two men were just so much alike, in personality, interests, and even physical stature. In family photos, one looked like an exact younger replica of the other.
The next few flowers she researched were determined to be larkspur, which carried the message of beautiful spirit; ivy, which meant fidelity; iris was a friendship that meant so much, or alternate meanings of faith, hope, and wisdom.
These flowers were painted next to the eldest child on the growth chart. That made sense because, according to birth order wisdom, the eldest offered his friendship to the mother and was often a caretaker to her later in life.
The blue snowball-like flower was the hydrangea. It bloomed with the meaning of perseverance and also had a few trailing strands of ivy (fidelity).
This seemed typical for a middle child—the one who had to work harder than the rest, the one who was neither the precious first nor the cherished baby, and the one who languished with less attention and had to persevere to find his place in the world.
She remembered when Anna painted a few additions on her headboard the night she wore her red dress with the rose in the center. Gemma carefully turned the pages to the description of leaves: dead.
Death of a loved one, sadness.
She remembered Anna at her vanity, making up her swollen eyelids and puffy lips to hide the traces of her crying. Then she’d painted the leaves, the dead brown leaves.
She stiffened against the cool wind that whipped off the water and bathed her face and the warm currents that followed and twirled around her legs like a snake.
“She knew she was going to die.”
Chapter 20
It was late in the day before Gemma finished with Tom and the landscapers and, frankly, found enough nerve to enter the manor again.
The portico was shaded now that the sun highlighted the other side of the house. She paused there before entering and breathed deeply. Like the tremors of an earthquake, the work she had just performed on the land would spread throughout the property, destroy the negative effects of Anna's tragic death, and birth a significant lightness.
She waited to feel it, the lack of century-old dark roots, the open space, the readiness from the house to willingly accept the good and positive she would plant at every turn.
Robins sang their evening song from the majestic magnolias that had seen the rise and fall of this home, and the manor's energy dragged beneath her unexpectedly. The improvements were barely perceptible. She ran her fingertips across her forehead and fought the feeling that she had just flunked an important test.
Removing the mark of Anna's death from the land ought to have lifted the energy significantly. Almost instantly. After all that work, she ought to have been able to walk into the manor and experience it differently. Maybe not completely as it would have been before Anna's death, but she ought to have been able to feel a river of light flowing through the foundation.
She lifted her feet one at a time, as though tar stretched beneath them, fastening misfortune to the house. She could feel it. The manor was still too anchored to the tragedy that lurked in the shadows.
"Damn it. Why?"
She sighed and paced back and forth, barely acknowledging the contractors who walked in and out. The screen door squeaked and slammed. She thought of her parents' home, of family and children. She remembered the growth chart she'd seen and the children who would have run in and out of this door.
She stopped and stared at it with its perfect coat of white paint. Perfection. Benjamin. Her heart curled in on itself. Maybe the darkness that remained here was the result of Benjamin's presence. Perhaps it wouldn't lift until he was gone.
She tried to breathe through the taut muscles of her chest. She needed to create a much more positive environment, one that would be ill-fitting to who he was, one that would release his attachment to the tragic memories trapped within the house.
That meant she would have to find more places in the house to clear. If removing the mark of Anna's death wasn't enough, then she would have to find out what was. Henry might know what that would be. She'd have to convince him to work with her on this. Surely, he would. With all the extra workers on staff, they were well ahead of schedule, almost finished with the restoration, and they couldn't run the risk that Benjamin would destroy something else so close to the judge’s deadline.
Once inside the Victorian kitchen, she paced her steps to the tune of jostling equipment, the voices of several men, and the distant cacophony of hammers and electric saws.
She knew she would have to go to the library first to survey the damage Benjamin had left behind. She and Tom had discussed the repair plans earlier in the day. He would already be there, pushing the implementation they agreed upon.
Being in this part of the house rattled her. Her steps were measured through the main hallway, fifteen…sixteen…seventeen…and quiet on the carpet, so as not to disturb any memories that might pour forth. They shouldn't at this time of day. But that didn't mean anything.
Every contractor who rounded the corner was a relief, a little beat of normal that encouraged her further into the house. Just like the sun that shone through every window on the western-facing front, it gave her a sense of protection. A temporary one, she knew. But she’d let those signs keep the darkness at bay for as long as possible. She needed the time to figure out what to clear next.
When she arrived at the library, Henry stood next to Tom and several other men. They surveyed bookshelves that had been ripped from their home, splintered into pieces, and scattered on the ground. A gaping hole had been smashed into the wall. Last night's scene with Benjamin's bloodied half face flashed through her mind, and she stifled a shudder.
"He never stops searching." Tom gestured toward the bookshelf, his voice was even and his anger evident, but controlled.
"He would tear this house to shreds if we let him. We don't have time to replace this with custom work, not before the judge passes through.” Her head throbbed and her mouth was dry. This destruction couldn't go on.
"We'll have to find some ready-made shelves and stain them to match. Or maybe we can find some lumber from the leftover pieces we have out back." Gemma looked over at Tom. “Do we have anything that might work here? We could go back after the deadline and install a more custom solution."
Tom and the other workers discussed the idea and walked toward the door. "All right, let's go out back and see what we have that will work."
“We can't pull anyone off the staircase to do this," she called after them. "We're too close on that. But we need at least six to eight working on this right away."
She wanted to tell Henry what she’d discovered out back, about the flowers and their meanings. But he was busy staring into the hole that Benjamin had punched into the bookcase.
Secret love. Death.
Anna had planted those flowers so deliberately out back, then painted many of them on her headboard. In an era when most women didn’t have much of a voice, she was communicating something she felt passionately about. And she continued doing it right up until she died.
This had to have something to do with her death. Maybe something to do with what really needed to be cleared for the manor, so that Benjamin could go home. She wanted to tell Henry about that, too. She needed more information about the manor, and quickly.
“There’s something back here.” Henry's voice echoed in the space behind the wall.
She looked over Henry's shoulder into the darkness. A sensation of death and dying swamped her, and she held on to the counter-like surface below the bookshelf.
Henry leaned in. "Is there a flashlight out here?"
A subtle breeze drifted in from the hidden area, and she scrunched her nose. "Smells like…decay. Like something died back here.” She quickly tried to account for all the workers she'd come to know at the manor. "No one was missing on the job today, were they?”
