Dark Obsession: Chapter One

What follows is the first chapter from my new book in progress, Dark Obsession.

Chapter One

Apprehension

I glanced over at her again, but she was still asleep.

Or pretending to be, I couldn’t tell which.

At least she was silent.

As creepy as she was, now, almost as slack and motionless as a corpse, at least her eyes weren’t on me.  Those strange, pallid eyes that looked like all the color had been leeched out of them.  Like advertising posters that’d been left in a store window for too long.  She claimed it was due to her heart medication.  Because when she’d picked me up at the bus station, she’d caught me staring.

And that was how my new employer and I had gotten off to a wonderful start.

I hadn’t wanted to get into the car with her.  I had, in fact, wanted to run away screaming.  From the bus station and from what appeared to be my life.  But I hadn’t, because I couldn’t.  I needed a job.  And Octavia Louise Sprague-March, Mrs. Sprague-March to her friends, was the only one offering.

Not, sadly, employment as a graphic designer.  Which is what I’d always dreamed of being.  Or even as a graphic designer’s assistant.  Which would have been okay, too.  But as a nanny.  And so maybe I, Charlotte Dane, had lied.  Just a little.  Because I wanted a chance.  I wanted to get out.

I mean.  I hadn’t lied much.  I’d told her I knew a lot about children and, well, I did.  In a way.  I knew a lot about having been a child.  Once.  And, having lived in an orphanage until the previous week, I’d had a lot of exposure to other children.  Sometimes as their caretakers, off and on, but mostly as their friends and fellow sufferers.  Because unlike some of them, I’d never been adopted.  I’d been too old when my parents had died, and left me alone; everyone wanted babies.

And the sad truth is that you don’t stop being an orphan when you turn eighteen.  Or even nineteen, which I was now.  No Daddy Warbucks had ever come along offering me a scholarship to college and so, after spending the last year doing odd jobs around the only home I’d ever known in the hopes that they wouldn’t kick me out, although they really probably wouldn’t have, I decided to take my life into my own hands and try to earn some money.  So I could, like, go to college.  Go somewhere.  Do anything, except continue to stare at the nuns who’d raised me across the dinner table.

I snuck another covert look at Mrs. Sprague-March, whom I’d already begun to think of as Corpse Lady.

I really, really hoped I didn’t blurt that out at the wrong time.

Wait.

Was there a right time?

The March family, of whom Corpse Lady appeared to be the only representative, was offering seven hundred and fifty dollars per week plus room and board.  If I never went anywhere or did anything, I could save a lot of money.  And quickly.  I hadn’t dared hope, when I applied; when the woman from the agency called to tell me I’d been selected, I’d thought I was being pranked.  But then she’d mumbled something about me being the only person to apply—or something—and hung up.

I felt another shiver touch my spine.

It couldn’t be that bad, could it?

The sense of apprehension that had dogged me since had to be…just in my mind, right?  This was just me leaving Somerset County, Maine, for a new place.  A place with more people than cows.

Well, I consoled myself, at least Corpse Lady wasn’t driving.

Then things would definitely be a whole lot scarier.

Her chauffeur’s shoulders, in the front, were aggressively square and his posture was ramrod straight.  He hadn’t spoken to me at all, when he’d swung my two suitcases up into the trunk.  Everything I owned, in two suitcases.  I’d said hi, and his eyes had widened fractionally as though I’d just done something really rude and he was trying not to embarrass me by pointing it out.  Like, I don’t know, if we’d all been out at dinner and I’d started chewing on my toenails at the table.

Corpse Lady and I were sitting in the back.  Of some kind of Rolls-Royce.  I’d recognized the stupid little flying lady.  I looked around.  Everything was beige.

I thought back to what I knew.

What little I knew.

Maybe that would help me quell this rising tide of panic.

My new charge was named Phillip.  I hadn’t even seen a picture.  All I knew about him was that he was ten.  And that, like me, he’d lost his parents.  His, in some sort of boating accident.  But that wasn’t even when things had gotten bad….

Phillip’s grandfather, Slade Pew March, had been enormously wealthy.  His grandfather had gotten his start packing various fish—mostly codfish and mackerel—in barrels of salt and selling it to the army.  Slade, though, had transformed a profitable local factory into a worldwide empire.  Packages bearing his name, of every kind of seafood imaginable, could be found in grocery stores all over America.  And in grocery stores in most of Europe, Asia, and even parts of Africa under different names.

Slade hadn’t been as successful in his personal life, though.  His wife, or so I’d read when I looked the family up online, had hated him.  And his children had hated him more.  Almost as much as they’d hated—and still continued to hate—each other.  Slade had had three sons, total: John, the oldest, Hunter, and then Esmond.  John, who’d taken over the company after Slade retired, had gotten the bulk of the family’s fortune.  As well as the family’s estate, where I’d soon be living.  John had gotten a smaller estate, nearby and Esmond had gotten a large plot of land in Maine.  On which he’d apparently built some sort of cabin, which he’d then apparently forgotten to use.  Esmond was an archaeologist; unlike his brothers, he spent most of his time abroad.

John, preferring life in Boston to life in a podunk town that even H.P. Lovecraft had pronounced too strange to live in, had asked his brother to live at the main house and manage it for him.  Which Hunter had been only too happy to do.  If he thought Magnolia, Massachusetts, a tiny hamlet near Gloucester with virtually no people, was too boring to tolerate he’d never said.

I felt something crawling on the back of my neck and turned.

Corpse Lady—Mrs. March—was watching me.

I forced a small smile.  I hadn’t realized that she’d roused.  “It’s beautiful, here,” I said.  Just to have something to say.  The road, on either side, was lined with trees.  Which meant that, so far, Boston’s fabled North Shore didn’t look so different from most of Maine.  I didn’t think I’d seen a house, or much of anything else, for miles.

“There are houses, behind those trees.”  Corpse Lady’s eyes flashed.  “We like our privacy, around here.”

I nodded.  “Great.”

Corpse Lady’s lips compressed into something that might have been a smile.

“So, um…Phillip was living with Esmond?  Is that right?”

“Until recently.  Yes.”  Corpse Lady paused, considering.  “We thought it…best.  Wrest Park isn’t….”  Her eyes narrowed.  “A place for children.  Especially not those as weak and sickly as Phillip.”

“I…see.”

“Phillip was with Esmond for a month or so.  But then Esmond had to leave.”

“Leave?” I echoed stupidly.

That sniff again.  “He’s supposedly some sort of academic.”

“An archaeologist, right?”

“He spends his time digging in pits.”

And that, judging by my employer’s tone, was that.

But, surprising me, a few minutes later she spoke again.  Her voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard, somehow.  I’d preferred it when she was pretending—I was now sure she’d been pretending—to be asleep.  “John, my husband’s older brother, was a confirmed bachelor.  At least, for most of his life.  Then, at nearly fifty, he surprised us all by getting married.  And producing an heir.”

Phillip.

“Then he and Alice—well, you know.”

I did.

Or at least I thought I did.

I nodded.  I wanted to appear friendly.  I wanted to tell myself—to keep telling myself—that there was nothing wrong.  That the fact that I hadn’t been able to stop myself from dubbing her Corpse Lady didn’t mean that my new employer wasn’t the most wonderful woman in the world.

People couldn’t help how they looked, right?  It wasn’t her fault that she looked like Cinderella’s stepmother in the old animated film.  Only thinner.  I can’t help how I’m drawn.  She had the same steel gray hair, forced into the same out of date hairstyle, and the same way of looking at you that…made no sense.  Her eyes weren’t as green, though.  They were gray.  Like the underbelly of a fish.

The words were out before I could stop them: “what happened to Phillip’s last nanny?”

“She quit.  In a fit of tears.”

As though crying was the worst sin in the world.

Corpse Lady shook her head once, dismissively.  “No one knew why.”

I turned back toward the window.  It was midsummer, and the world was a riot of deep green.  Here or in Maine, I still loved it.  “I think this place is wonderful,” I said.  “And I’m positive, absolutely positive, that I’m going to love it here.”  Maybe I was trying to convince myself, I don’t know.  But the words felt genuine enough as I was saying them.

There was a silence.

And then, in that same controlled voice, “I hope so.”