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Chapter 1
October 15, 2014
Blue Peacock Manor
“God, Mom, you’ve got to be kidding!” Jade said from the passenger seat of the Explorer as Sarah drove along the once-gravel lane.
“Not kidding,” Sarah responded. “You know that.” Winding through thick stands of pine, fir, and cedar, the twin ruts were weed-choked and filled with potholes that had become puddles with the recent rain.
“You can’t actually think that we can live here!” Catching glimpses of the huge house through the trees, Jade, seventeen, was clearly horrified and, as usual, wasn’t afraid to voice her opinion.
“Mom’s serious,” Gracie said from the backseat, where she was crammed between piles of blankets, and mounds of comforters, sleeping bags, and the other bedding they were moving from Vancouver. “She told us.”
Jade shot a glance over her shoulder. “I know. But it’s worse than I thought.”
“That’s impossible,” Gracie said.
“No one asked your opinion!”
Sarah’s hands tightened over the steering wheel. She’d already heard how she was ruining her kids’ lives by packing them up and returning to the old homestead where she’d been born and raised. To hear them tell it, she was the worst mother in the world. The word “hate” had been thrown around, aimed at her, the move, and their miserable lives in general.
Single motherhood. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted, she’d decided long ago. So her kids were still angry with her. Too bad. Sarah needed a fresh start.
And though Jade and Gracie didn’t know it, they did too.
“It’s like we’re in another solar system,” Jade said as the thickets of trees gave way to a wide clearing high above the Columbia River.
Gracie agreed, “In a land far, far away.”
“Oh, stop it. It’s not that bad,” Sarah said. Her girls had lived most of their lives in Vancouver, Washington, right across the river from Portland, Oregon. Theirs had been a city life. Out here, in Stewart’s Crossing, things would be different, and even more so at Sarah’s childhood home of Blue Peacock Manor.
Perched high on the cliffs overlooking the Columbia River, the massive house where Sarah had been raised rose in three stories of cedar and stone. Built in the Queen Anne style of a Victorian home, its gables and chimneys knifed upward into a somber gray sky, and from her vantage point Sarah could now see the glass cupola that opened onto the widow’s walk. For a second, she felt a frisson of dread slide down her spine, but she pushed it aside.
“Oh. My. God.” Jade’s jaw dropped open as she stared at the house. “It looks like something straight out of The Addams Family.”
“Let me see!” In the backseat, Gracie unhooked her seat belt and leaned forward for a better view. “She’s right.” For once Gracie agreed with her older sister.
“Oh, come on,” Sarah sai
d, but Jade’s opinion wasn’t that far off. With a broad, sagging porch and crumbling chimneys, the once-grand house that in the past the locals had called the Jewel of the Columbia was in worse shape than she remembered.
“Are you blind? This place is a disaster!” Jade was staring through the windshield and slowly shaking her head, as if she couldn’t believe the horrid turn her life had just taken. Driving closer to the garage, they passed another building that was falling into total disrepair. “Mom. Seriously. We can’t live here.” She turned her wide, mascara-laden eyes on her mother as if Sarah had gone completely out of her mind.
“We can and we will. Eventually.” Sarah cranked on the wheel to swing the car around and parked near the walkway leading to the entrance of the main house. The decorative rusted gate was falling off its hinges, the arbor long gone, the roses flanking the flagstone path leggy and gone to seed. “We’re going to camp out in the main house until the work on the guesthouse is finished, probably next week. That’s where we’ll hang out until the house is done, but that will take . . . months, maybe up to a year.”
“The guest . . . Oh my God, is that it?” Jade pointed a black-tipped nail at the smaller structure located across a wide stone courtyard from its immense counterpart. The guesthouse was in much the same shape as the main house and outbuildings. Shingles were missing, the gutters were rusted, and most of the downspouts were disconnected or missing altogether. Many of the windows were boarded over as well, and the few that remained were cracked and yellowed.
“Charming.” Jade let out a disgusted breath. “I can’t wait.”
“I thought you’d feel that way,” Sarah said with a faint smile.
“Funny,” Jade mocked.
“Come on. Buck up. It’s just for a little while. Eventually we’ll move into the main house for good, if we don’t sell it.”
Gracie said, “You should sell it now!”