Bird in the Hand
The mourning dove’s bittersweet call was cut short, strangled into a silence that was even more unnerving than the birdsong itself. It was the first sign that all was not well at Lovelace House, and like most early signs of sickness, it was subtle. Easy to miss.
Marin Blythe barely noticed the sound at all. She certainly didn’t notice its abrupt end. Marin was preoccupied, still thinking about the strangeness of the driver who had dropped her off at the gate, refusing to take her all the way to the house.
Place is cursed, the man said.
He didn’t slam on the breaks or act hysterical. His voice didn’t convey fear, despite the distance he insisted on keeping from the mansion, but rather something more like boredom. It’s cursed, of course, everyone knows—his tone had been dry, humorless. A calm acceptance of fact, like he was telling her to carry an umbrella because it looked like rain. And while he may not have known Marin’s business with Lovelace House, he didn’t care to keep her from it, either. So out Marin went, onto the gravel path.
But a few minutes later, as she rounded the last bend of the driveway, Marin looked up, her curiosity blooming.
It was just a house.
A large house, and an old one. But just a house.
Marin rather liked the ivy that climbed one side of it, all the way up to its rounded turret. She liked the weathered gray stone peeking out from underneath the greenery. She liked the front steps, wide and grand and welcoming. She liked that there were windows in surplus, which told her that the inside of the house would be filled with streaming sunlight during the day. Marin couldn’t stand dark, cramped spaces. Not anymore.
She lifted her suitcase, shifted her backpack from where it was slipping off her shoulder, and approached the house.
Cursed, the driver had said.
Stories, thought Marin. And not even very good ones.
Marin stopped to rearrange her skirt. The cheap polyester tights she’d worn were itchy, and their static cling had harassed her the entirety of her cross-country flight. When I finally take these off, I’m burning them, she vowed. When she looked back to the house again, a woman stood at the top of those wide front stairs.
She was easily the most elegant woman that Marin had ever seen. She must have been nearly six feet tall and wore a long dark blue dress that pinched at her narrow waist. The navy was stark where it contrasted with the woman’s skin, light as porcelain, as though she avoided sunlight altogether, locked away inside the house behind her. High cheekbones graced her face, which was framed by dark blond hair cut like a razor’s edge just below her chin. Marin recognized the woman from her author photo. It was printed on the back of the tattered paperback that Marin had read almost to pieces before shoving it into the side pocket of her backpack and getting on a plane to come meet Alice Lovelace herself.
Marin’s awe was quickly replaced by a feeling of inadequacy so strong that she had to dip her face to hide the red flush she knew was blossoming across her own very low and rounded cheeks. Her gaze went to her brown oxfords, dusty from her walk up the gravel driveway. She focused on the precise place where those oxfords pinched her toes—half a size too small, but they’d been on sale.
“Ms. Lovelace.” Marin spoke to her feet. “I’m—”
“Marin, of course,” Alice said, and Marin looked up to see the woman’s arms spread wide. “Welcome to Lovelace House.”
Marin climbed the stairs and stepped into Alice’s embrace, which was stiff and awkward but only lasted a moment before Alice was ushering her inside. The foyer was open and bright. The floor had wide-planked hardwood in a deep walnut color, and the walls were white, but one of those shades of white that Marin was sure had a special name, like French Cream or Ivory Bone or Pearl Kiss. The color was warm and earthy and reflected the sunlight coming in from the bay windows in the next room. There was art hanging on the entryway wall. It wasn’t the kind Marin’s mother had put up in their apartment. It wasn’t something torn from a magazine and placed in a frame from the thrift store. This was an actual, real piece of art, with swirls in the paint that the artist themself had left there.
Marin wanted to touch it.
“My god, you look just like her,” Alice whispered, and Marin turned to find Alice Lovelace studying her profile with the same scrutiny and wonder that Marin had felt while admiring the art.
Marin pictured herself as Alice was seeing her, for the first time. Marin’s preference was jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers any day of the week, but she’d wanted to make a good first impression, so she’d worn a burgundy corduroy skirt—her only skirt—and the itchy tights, and the shiny shoes, even if they did hurt her feet and had gathered dust on the driveway.
Marin herself had always been a gentler reflection of her mother. She had the same long, dark hair, wavy and thick. Today she’d twisted it up into two buns at the nape of her neck while she traveled. Her mother used to call it her Princess Leialook. Marin’s breasts and belly and thighs were soft and rounded in the same places as her mother. Curves that always made men and women alike turn and watch her mother walk by them.
Unlike her mother, Marin’s face featured constellations of brown freckles across her nose and cheeks, stark against white skin that blushed too easily. In fact, she felt the heat rising yet again under Alice’s scrutiny. Marin’s mother used to say that her emotions flickered like a movie across her face. All she had to do was watch to know all of Marin’s secrets.
Marin also had her mother’s wide mouth and full lips, and Marin liked to draw attention to them by wearing dark red lipstick, which she had done today.
Marin lifted her chin a tick higher at Alice’s comparison. She was very much her mother’s daughter and proud of it. “Yes,” she said, “everyone said we were like sisters.”
Alice had lifted one hand but dropped it now, seeming to remember that it was her long-lost friend’s daughter, and not the friend herself, standing in front of her.
“No, not sisters,” Alice said. “I was the closest thing to a sister Cordelia ever knew.”
Marin opened her mouth but closed it again, unsure of how to respond. She was saved from having to figure it out by the patter of feet on the stairs.
The girls.
They were the reason she was here, after all, and she’d almost forgotten, so caught up in meeting Alice Lovelace—the Alice Lovelace—the same woman whose novels Marin had coveted from the age of twelve. The same woman that Marin’s mother had once called her best friend, long ago, when they were children themselves.
Alice met the children at the bottom of the stairs.
“I’m so thrilled for you to meet Marin, your new nanny. Marin flew here all the way from California to take care of you. She’s a long way from home, so let’s be welcoming, all right?”
The girls did not look much alike. One had brown hair streaked with golden highlights and bound into braids, and she was the taller of the two. She stepped forward, and her angular face scrunched up a bit as she obviously looked Marin up and down. “She’s very . . . young.”
“She’s the same age as Evie,” Alice said.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Marin offered, sticking her hand out.
The girl took it with all the confidence of an adult. “Wren Hallowell,” she said. “Rowena, actually, but you may call me Wren.”
“And I’m Thea.” The other child spoke from where she lingered on the bottom step. “Theadora, actually,” she added, her tone both mimicking and mocking her sister’s seriousness. “But you can call me Thea. Please.”
“Well, Wren and Thea, I’m Marin. Just Marin. And it’s very nice to meet you both.”
Thea grinned, revealing a smile that was full of teeth. The adult ones were coming in before some of the baby teeth had fallen out, and as a result she had rows of teeth, like a little shark. Unlike Wren, Thea was towheaded, and her bright blond hair was cut short like Alice’s, though Thea’s hair fell in curls. She was endearing from the jump with her bright brown eyes, alight with curiosity. She smiled at Marin easily, whereas Wren seemed less sure.
The children were dressed alike, in white shirts and blue cardigans and chino pants and shining shoes. They were homeschooled—Alice had mentioned their tutor in one of her emails—but they were dressed impeccably. Not a speck of dust in sight.
Marin had never had a sister—or even the closest thing to a sister—but she’d always wondered if siblings liked to be dressed alike all the time.
She doubted it.
The conversation lulled, and Marin stood planted to the walnut floorboards as though she’d suddenly grown roots.
When Marin had gotten that first email from Alice Lovelace, she nearly fell out of her chair. As far as she knew, her mother hadn’t spoken to Alice in decades, and yet there was Alice reaching out with condolences within days of Marin’s loss. And crucially, throwing Marin a life jacket in a sea of grief and uncertainty—an offer for employment. Alice knew Marin was alone, and not quite eighteen, and Alice needed a summer nanny, and well, maybe they could help each other. She offered Marin room and board in exchange for nannying the girls every day while Alice wrote.
Marin made herself do some research before agreeing—though she knew in an instant she would say yes. It was the only real option she had. Besides, Alice Lovelace was something of a legend. She was a bestselling horror novelist and would have been independently wealthy from that alone. But she was also a Lovelace. The family had a longstanding prestige in New England, a name that once paralleled Rockefeller and Kennedy. They had left Alice the manor as well as what was rumored to be a significant inheritance.
Standing in that foyer, the enormity of it all struck Marin at once, rendering her overwhelmed and awkward in front of them. How would she take care of these girls? They were from an entirely different world than the bare-step-above-poverty one she had occupied with her mother.
Alice had been convincing, insistent even, when she’d contacted Marin. And yet there Marin stood, silent and unsure of herself.
It was Thea who saved her. Finally venturing off the final step, she slipped her small hand into Marin’s larger one.
“A tour,” Thea said, and Marin saw her elbow her older sister.
“Of course,” Wren said. “Mother, we’ll show Marin the house and the estate.”
Estate. The word, and Wren’s formal tone, didn’t help Marin’s feeling that she had jumped into the deep end by accepting this offer.
But she gave a nod to Alice, who stood and watched them climb the stairs together.
“Your room is down this way.” Wren turned left at the top of the wide staircase.
“Is the other wing forbidden?” Marin asked with a laugh, gesturing to the hallway that ran in the opposite direction.
“No,” Wren said. “Of course not. Why would it be?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t mean—it’s just—well in your mother’s books, someone often says something ominous early on, like ‘Don’t go in the east wing—it’s forbidden.’”
“Of course they do.” Wren rolled her eyes.
“That’s silly, Marin.” Thea piped up. “There’s nothing wrong with any of the wings.” Thea leaned over to conspire, dropping her voice to a whisper. “But I’d stay out of the basement if I were you.”
Thea dropped Marin’s hand then and pushed open a door. “You’re here.”
Marin followed the girls into her new room. Her new home. It was bright and pretty, with light green walls and furniture that all matched in a rich cherrywood. Marin went to the window and pushed it partially open. There was a small balconette outside, only just wide enough for some potted plants. Beyond the yard, Marin could see only ocean in front of her, and the Maine coastline, stretching in either direction. There was a tiny strip of land to the right—another peninsula on Casco Bay. The tide was out, and instead of huge swatches of sand like the California beaches, here there were layers of rocks and tide pools, and seaweed left exposed in large clumps along the muddy edges. In the distance, Marin thought she could make out the faint white tower of a lighthouse. Or maybe it was a cloud. Marin squinted her eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. The sunlight on the water played tricks on her.
“Welcome to Lovelace House.” Wren’s voice had little warmth in it, and when Marin looked down at the girl at her side, Wren’s eyes weren’t on the ocean, but staring right at Marin, her gaze calculating.
Marin flinched and immediately regretted it when the side of Wren’s lips curved up in satisfaction.
Wren turned away, tugging Thea along with her. “We’ll let you settle in a bit, and you can meet us downstairs for the rest of the tour.”
“I like her,” Marin heard Thea whisper to her sister as they left the room. “I hope she lasts longer than the others.”
Then the girls left Marin alone, and when she heard the door click shut, Marin perched in relief on the edge of her bed. But before she could draw her next breath, a muted thump sounded from the other side of the room.
Marin turned toward the noise, waiting and listening for it to sound again.
THUMP.
Marin stood immediately. She couldn’t help but think of a passage from one of her favorite Lovelace novels, about a house possessed by something sinister. Something that “lived inside the very walls,” as Alice had written it.
Marin steeled herself and walked swiftly to the closet, pulling the door open before she could think about it any longer.
Inside there was a bird.
Its feathers and beak were bloodied, and she could see where it had scratched at the hardwood floor, could see the bloody marks on the inside of the door where it had been hurling its body. Marin scooped it up without a thought and carried it to her open window, setting it gently on the sill.
A moment later, it flew out, and Marin took deep breaths to calm herself down, glancing down at the blood left on her palms from the ordeal.
And then there was a loud crack right beside her, and she leapt back.
The bird had come back.
Marin watched helplessly as its small body crumpled from its impact against the glass and fell to the balconette. It twitched once more before growing still.
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