1
Now
They say lots of things about going home. Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home.
You can never go home again.
But Emma Jansen was, in fact, going home again. Well, not home, exactly, because the place she grew up wasn’t really hers, never really belonged to her.
Still, she had lived there. She had lived there and loved there and had a life there. And that meant something to her.
The train slid into the station at Glen Cove three minutes late. Every time she walked off the train at the Glen Cove station, she imagined herself as Audrey Hepburn, in that scene from Sabrina. She would simply walk to the curb and the dashing David Larrabee would drive up, as if on cue, in his Nash Healey Spider.
Was that why she hadn’t taken one of the catering vans out to Long Island? An attempt to live out the plot of one of her favorite childhood movies? She’d watched and rewatched Sabrina so many times with her father as a kid that she had practically every line, every scene memorized. Sabrina may have been a chef, like Emma was now, but Sabrina Fairchild certainly did not drive around in a catering van like Emma Jansen usually did.
Emma walked to the cab stand. No David Larrabee in sight. She adjusted her tote bag on her shoulder as she got in line for a taxi. Moments later, she was in the back of a cab, windows down.
“First time in Glen Cove?” the driver asked when she told him the address.
“No, I grew up here,” she said, forcing a smile as she looked out the open window.
In the city, thirty-two-year-old Emma usually took the subway. She hated when cabdrivers tried to make conversation. She never knew what to say. She chastised herself for not ordering a rideshare. At least with the press of a button she could request a quiet ride.
It wasn’t that Emma was unkind. She simply wasn’t good at small talk. Emma usually jumped right to the big talk.
“In that case, welcome home,” the cabdriver said, his smile as wide as the length of Long Island.
Emma didn’t know how to respond.
The longer they drove through Glen Cove, the larger the houses became. When they drove up to the address Emma had given him, it looked like an abandoned parcel, not the formerly grand estate it once was: Rolling Hill. A huge construction gate circled the property, with a small opening off the main road.
“This it?” the cabdriver asked. A tiny sign on the gate read, Sales Center, with an arrow directing cars to drive through.
“Yes,” Emma said, staring out the window up the long, sweeping driveway. Even in its disarray, she’d know this place anywhere. “That’s it.”
As they pulled up the drive, Emma felt as if she were in a dream. The sort of dream where you know exactly where you are, but everything is different somehow. The property seemed smaller than she’d remembered. Was that because now, as an adult, she was bigger herself? Or had her mind made things grander in her memory, made every pathway wider, made every structure more imposing?
The estate was in shambles. The grass was brown, dried-up, all over. The bricks on the main driveway were falling apart, breaking away at the edges in some spots, completely missing in others. Gone were the beautiful rows of boxwood shrubs, lined up neatly with nary a leaf out of place, that Linwood would tend to with care. He would spend hours each day meticulously cutting back the greenery, making sure the garden looked polished, manicured. But now there were no flowers in sight, no hydrangea bushes or peonies. Things that made the estate look alive, happy. Lived-in.
It looked abandoned. Which was what it was, really. When the family left, it had been bought by a real estate developer who’d planned to flip the house and the property. But then the recession hit, and there were no buyers for the house and its surrounding eight acres. It soon went into foreclosure and sat empty for years. As the estate deteriorated, it became harder and harder to sell, because even though the property had value, it was a fixer-upper. The amount of money it would take to get the estate back to its former glory seemed infinite. No other developer would touch it.
Until now.
The cab drove past the main house. Emma squinted—surely that wasn’t it. The house she knew was stately, and stood proudly among the tall pine trees. One of the pines had fallen over and had taken permanent residence in the left wing of the house, in what used to be the formal living room. The rest of the house hadn’t fared much better: the Juliet balconies on the front windows were in various stages of disrepair, and there were broken windows throughout the first floor. The grand lighting fixture that used to hang under the porte cochere was missing, and Emma noticed some faint spray paint marks across the front door.
The house wasn’t her house anymore. It had been damaged and vandalized. It wasn’t cared for, loved, like in its heyday. Emma felt it in the pit of her belly. Coming back had been a mistake.
“Up here?” the cabdriver asked, stopping at a clearing with a lonely construction trailer standing in the middle. A few luxury cars—one Mercedes and two BMWs—were parked in front. There was a small sign next to the door marked Sales Center.
“Thank you,” Emma said, and paid the driver.
She stepped out of the cab and took a deep breath. Whenever she’d come home, the smell of the pine trees would always calm Emma down. She’d forgotten that, the way the pine trees greeted you. The smell of the place was such a huge part of her memory. Walking into the kitchen, the warm perfume of roasted garlic, fresh rosemary, and bread baking in the oven. Every spring, the faint smell of the lilacs, which would tell her that summer was coming. When the lilacs bloomed, they’d sleep with the windows open, the lovely scent seeping into her dreams, making them sweet. Even the back shed, which housed the bikes, had a particular aroma. Dirt and sweat and nectar. It smelled like an adventure to come.
But Emma didn’t smell anything wonderful like that as she walked toward the Sales Center. It smelled like construction, which she supposed made sense, since the estate was now a construction site, but the notes of wood being torn down, dust lingering in the air, and gasoline from the massive construction vehicles didn’t soothe her the way the pines used to. It only brought on an allergy attack.
“Are you here for the tour?” a kind voice asked. A woman opened the door to the trailer as Emma approached, sneezing.
Emma tried to say yes as she crossed the threshold, but another sneeze escaped. “Excuse me,” Emma said.
“Looks like you could use one of these,” the woman said, offering Emma a napkin and a bottle of water. The water had a printed label, dark gray with the word Hepburn in white block letters.
“Thank you,” Emma said. She took a sip of water and then turned the water bottle over in her hands, examining the label.
“The presentation’s about to begin,” the woman said with a wide smile as she walked into the Sales Center. Emma followed her lead.
The inside of the trailer didn’t match the outside. From the outside, it looked worn down, beaten up. But inside was another story entirely. Decked out in rich carpeting overlaid with thick rugs, and tasteful wallpaper and crown molding, it didn’t feel like you were inside a trailer. It was bigger, too. Emma would later find out that it was actually two construction trailers combined to create the elegant Sales Center she was standing in.
Emma followed the woman to the center of the trailer, where they had a graceful living room set up. A chocolate-brown leather couch, distressed in all the right places so as to denote “lived-in.” Two oversize rattan armchairs, with cushions in the same fabric as the pillows on the couch. A large tufted ottoman made of a rich brown velvet, with an enormous rattan tray placed just so. A dark red rug was laid down on the floor to delineate the space. And it worked. Emma truly felt as if she were in someone’s warm living room, and not in a construction trailer. The attention to detail was impressive—small vases filled with flowers were scattered about, a coffee and tea station had been set up toward the back, and the tiny windows all had big window treatments, giving the illusion that they were larger.
The couches and chairs were already filled with people, so Emma stood behind the oversize leather couch.
A man walked out from the back of the trailer. When he saw her, he smiled. “Well, I’ll be.”
Emma directed her eyes down toward the plush rug, suddenly embarrassed. She wished she’d checked her appearance before walking in. She was probably disheveled from the train ride, from the allergy attack. And here he stood, looking expensive in his custom-made sport coat and designer jeans. His look now was so different from the way she remembered him as a child—messy, always with filthy knees from playing in the dirt. It was different from the last time she’d seen him, a mere seven years ago.
She wondered what he thought when he looked at her.
“I’d like to welcome you all to Hepburn,” he said, throwing his arms out wide. It wasn’t only his appearance that was more polished, Emma thought.
It was his whole manner. It was soft, silky smooth. “What we’re building here is a new community, one we hope you’ll want to be a part of.”
The woman who’d greeted Emma at the door now passed around glossy brochures.
“Hepburn is so called because you are standing on a piece of history. And I don’t say that just because it’s where I grew up.” He paused for laughter. Most of the people laughed. Everyone, in fact, except for Emma. She narrowed her eyes, examined every square inch of his face. “This estate, throughout my childhood, was lovingly known as the Audrey Hepburn Estate.”
“They filmed Sabrina here, didn’t they?” a woman seated on the brown leather couch asked. “I knew it looked familiar!”
“Good eye,” he said, flashing a warm smile. Emma looked down at his hands: no wedding ring. “This estate was the inspiration for the Billy Wilder picture, Sabrina. Originally built in 1899, neighbors took to calling it the Audrey Hepburn Estate soon after the release of the film.”
Wrong, Emma thought. That was wrong, and he knew it. She didn’t know what to tackle first—the snooty way he was calling a movie a picture as if he were a Hollywood executive, circa 1950, or the fact that he was perpetrating a lie. But that lie, she supposed, was the reason all this was happening. He was tearing down the estate and creating an entire new world in its place. A world filled with very small, very expensive condos. A luxury apartment building and a bunch of town houses. He justified the price with this story that the estate was the inspiration for the Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina. He was leaning into it—the brochure had photographs of the indoor tennis court, and the caption referenced the scene in the movie where Audrey Hepburn waits for William Holden, only to be surprised by the appearance of Humphrey Bogart instead. Hell, he was calling the place Hepburn.
Truth was, they called it the Audrey Hepburn Estate because it shared an address with the Larrabee estate in the movie. Dosoris Lane. Sometimes the owners said that the estate was supposed to have been used in the film, but ultimately wasn’t because of studio red tape, and sometimes they said that the property had merely been the inspiration for the Larrabee estate in the film.
Even though they filmed parts of the movie in Glen Cove (hello, Glen Cove train station!), the place where Emma grew up was not one of them. Hill Grove, the home of George Lewis in Beverly Hills, was used for filming.
But none of this really mattered, because now he was tearing it all down.
Emma had needed to see it one more time.
“Will we get a tour of the main house?” Emma asked, casually flipping through the brochure. The pictures of the main house weren’t real—it took a minute to figure out, but they were computer-generated ima
ges from old photographs. Emma marveled at how true to life they looked. She looked away for a moment, trying to picture the real house in her mind’s eye.
“We hadn’t planned to do that,” he replied with a wide smile. “It’s fallen into disrepair, and we wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Or is it,” Emma challenged, “because you wouldn’t want anyone to know that it’s haunted?”
The guests on the couch all gasped, but he didn’t even flinch. He laughed a deep, throaty laugh, very unlike the many belly laughs they’d shared as kids. This was a grown-up man’s laugh, not a child’s. This was a rich person’s laugh. This was a patronizing laugh. “The house is not haunted. Simply another bit of old folklore about the estate. We can’t go in because, among other things, an enormous pine tree is in the middle of the living room. And a family of squirrels have made themselves quite at home inside.”
“So this has nothing to do with the summer the chef died?” Emma said. “Who haunts the house to this day?”
A woman sitting on the couch squealed with delight. “Is that true?” she asked, her eyes searching.
“It’s not true,” he said, rubbing his eye carefully with his pointer finger. He rearranged his face into a broad smile. “Of course that’s not true.”
“The house is haunted,” Emma said, staring him down. “You know it, and I know it.”
“Oh, did you grow up here, too?” the woman on the couch asked. She had swiveled her body around and now had all of her focus on Emma. “Are you a van der Wraak?”
“No,” Emma said, adjusting her shoulders so that she stood up straight. “My mother was the maid.”
2ThenAge five
They were raised like siblings. Emma and Henry. Henry and Emma.
They were inseparable. Best friends. Two peas in a pod. Not equals, because Henry was the grandson of the owners of the house and Emma was the daughter of the woman who worked there, but they wouldn’t be able to see these differences until they were older. Until the world pointed them out.
They were the only children in a house filled with adults. There were the van der Wraaks, of course, Felix and Agnes, and then there was an entire staff that tended to them. A driver, and a chef, and a gardener, and a groundskeeper, and a house manager. There were nannies and tutors for the kids. And security. There was a team of five, charged with the safety of the family and the grounds. Emma’s parents, Mila and Hans, were the maid and the butler.
Felix and Agnes van der Wraak: born and raised in Holland, came to America after the war. They arrived with only a few pennies in their pockets, but quickly remedied that. Felix was an art dealer, and worked with the most priceless of pieces. There was only one rule that Emma and Henry needed to obey in this house full of adults, and that was to keep away from Felix’s study, where he would temporarily store Rembrandts and van Goghs and Vermeers and Renoirs and Klimts.
Mila was known for her wide smile that could brighten anyone’s day, even clients of Mr. van der Wraak, who came to the house angry that their art hadn’t appreciated in the way that it should have. Thirty-one years junior to Emma’s father, Mila was beautiful, even in her unflattering uniform.
Emma marveled at the way her father took such pride in his job. Hans Jansen could make carrying a tray with high tea to Agnes van der Wraak and her high society friends seem like an art. Agnes and her friends were charmed in equal measure by Hans’s handsome face and the care with which he handled his daily duties. His suits were always perfectly pressed, his shoes always neatly shined. He looked like a soldier in his butler’s uniform, and when she would come home after kindergarten each day, he would offer her a salute. Emma always offered Hans a salute in return, just like he’d taught her. Hans had been a Resistance fighter in another life, at age fourteen during World War II. Before Emma was born. Before Emma’s mother was even born. Back when he lived in Holland.
“One day,” he would tell her, “we will be as rich as the van der Wraaks. You’ll see. But for now, your mother and I will work here, save our pennies, and bide our time. Before you know it, we’ll be buying a house that’s even grander than this one. We will have what we deserve.”
Emma lived with her parents in the apartment over the garage. Even though they didn’t live in the main house, Hans tended to it as dutifully as if it were his own. He made sure every doorknob was polished. He carefully monitored the humidity levels in the house to make sure the wood trim and moldings didn’t dry out in the winter. In the ways that mattered, Emma believed, the house belonged to her father more than it belonged to Felix and Agnes. He was the one who loved the house, who cared for it. He was the one who made it a home.
Each night before bed, Emma’s father would sit in the rocking chair in the corner and tell her a bedtime story. Every night, a new story. There was always a princess, and she was always being hidden away. Something would happen, and everyone would realize that the little girl they’d ignored was truly special. Destined for something great. The details changed nightly, but every story had the same ending: our princess, pure of heart and soul, finally realizing her destiny.
Henry’s parents died in a car accident when he was only three years old, and he’d been living with his grandparents since then. Emma didn’t think that Mr. van der Wraak would ever sit in Henry’s room and tell him a bedtime story. He was always running out of the house
at odd hours, rushing around, as if his life depended on it. He took his artwork and his career entirely too seriously. His grandson less so. Even though Emma was jealous of the wealth that Henry’s family had, she never envied him his grandparents. Henry may have had the house and the money, but Emma had the love.
Age six
They called it the Audrey Hepburn Estate. At age six, Emma had no idea who Audrey Hepburn was, or why it was important to give Rolling Hill some other name, but on her first day of the first grade, the other students all asked if she lived there. Even the teachers were whispering about it. Emma was the girl who lived at the Audrey Hepburn Estate.
“Who’s Audrey Hepburn?” she asked her father when she came home from school that day. They were sitting in the kitchen, eating freshly made biscuits that Fleur, the van der Wraaks’ chef, had made especially for them. Fleur and Emma’s father were close friends. Both from the Netherlands, both the same age, and both with a sweet tooth that demanded treats every afternoon. Fleur always saw to it that Hans and Emma had a proper tea after school, when Hans would take a quick break from his work. They would regale Emma with stories of their childhood, tales of how they ate bread made from tulip bulbs to survive the famine.
“A very famous actress, back from my time, before you were born,” Hans told her. “Why do you ask?”
“Everyone at school seemed to know who Henry and I were,” she said. “They said that we lived at the Audrey Hepburn Estate.”
Her father laughed. Emma loved her father’s laugh. It was deep and rich, and he always held his stomach when he laughed out loud. “You live at Rolling Hill.”
“Then why did they keep calling it that?”
“There was a famous movie called Sabrina, and an actress named Audrey Hepburn starred in it,” he explained. “In the movie, Sabrina’s father was the chauffeur for a very wealthy family called the Larrabees. Sabrina lived with her father over the garage, just like you do. The estate was in Glen Cove, and there were rumors that the movie was filmed right here, at Rolling Hill.”
“They filmed a movie here?” Emma’s eyes widened in excitement.
“Well, no,” her father said, taking a measured sip of his tea. “They began filming in Glen Cove, but the breezes coming off the water ruined every shot. They ultimately filmed the movie in Los Angeles.”
“Then why does everyone think that Rolling Hill is the Audrey Hepburn Estate?”
“For a while about eight years back, right when your mother and I came here, Mr. and Mrs. van der Wraak were thinking of selling the estate. They hired a real estate agent, and that real estate agent mistakenly thought that Rolling Hill was a stand-in for the Larrabee estate in the film, since they share an address. Mr. van der Wraak ne
ver corrected him—he thought that using the name of the film while advertising the property might help bring in buyers—and then the name stuck. People started calling it the Audrey Hepburn Estate.”
“But that’s not true.”
“Well, it was a misunderstanding.”
“Mr. van der Wraak lied,” Emma said, furrowing her brow. “He is a liar.”
“It’s not quite that black-and-white, sweetheart,” Hans said. “It was a silly misunderstanding.”
“It was a lie,” Emma said, shaking her head. “Lying is bad.”
“Lying is bad,” her father said. “That’s true. But perhaps I’m not explaining it properly.”
“If it’s not the truth, then it’s a lie,” Emma said, reciting what she’d learned in kindergarten the year prior. Then, reasoning from there: “So, Mr. van der Wraak is a liar. He’s a bad man.”
“Mr. van der Wraak is a not a bad man,” Hans said, laughter in his voice. “No person is all good or all bad, anyway. Things in the adult world are more complicated than you understand.”
Emma didn’t understand. If saying something that wasn’t true was a lie, then Mr. van der Wraak was a liar. And if lying was bad, then Mr. van der Wraak was a bad man. Emma thought that maybe her father was the one who didn’t understand.
“But none of that matters now,” Hans said. “We’re lucky that the house wasn’t sold and that your mother and I still have jobs here. Coming to America from another country is hard. We’re lucky to have jobs that pay well. So don’t go around calling Mr. van der Wraak a liar, all right, mijn pure liefde?”
Emma loved her father’s pet name for her: my pure angel.
“Yes, Father,” Emma said. She certainly wouldn’t go around calling Mr. van der Wraak a liar, but she would still think it, in her heart of hearts. Her father always said that your thoughts were your own—if you kept them to yourself, no one would ever have to know.
“I have a good idea,” Hans said. “Why don’t you and I go rent a copy of Sabrina tonight and watch it together?”
“All right,” Emma said, even though the idea of watching an old black-and-white movie didn’t exactly appeal to her.
“You’re going to love this movie, ...
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