The House at the End of the Road

TThe first thing anyone in Port Ellery told me about Wren Hollow was that a man had murdered his bride there.

The second thing was that the pie was good.

“Blueberry,” said the woman at the end of the counter, sliding her plate an inch toward me like she was offering evidence. “Last of the season. You’ll want a slice before you drive up there. Nobody should meet that house on an empty stomach.”

I had been in the town for eleven minutes. Long enough to park my truck crooked outside the Anchor Diner, peel off a rain jacket that had given up somewhere around Portsmouth, and order a coffee I didn’t want because it was the only warm thing on the menu that didn’t require a conversation.

Apparently I’d miscalculated.

“How do you know I’m going up there?” I asked.

She was seventy if she was a day, small and square in a cardigan the color of wet moss, with reading glasses pushed up into white hair that had been cut by someone who didn’t love her. Her eyes were very sharp and very blue.

“Because you’ve got plaster dust in the seams of your boots, you’ve got a toolbag on your passenger seat that costs more than my car, and Garrett Pell has been telling everyone at the hardware store that he hired a real restoration expert from Boston.” She did a decent impression of Garrett’s voice, which I’d only heard over the phone and already disliked. “Also, it’s October, and nobody comes to Port Ellery in October unless they have to.”

“Nora Whitlock,” I said, because it seemed easier than arguing.

“June Haskett. I run the historical society, which means I run a room above the library with a dehumidifier and eleven thousand photographs of boats.” She took a bite of pie. “You know the story?”

“I know the house was built in 1897 by a cabinetmaker named Wren, that it’s a Queen Anne with an intact turret and original quarter-sawn oak paneling, and that the east wing had a fire in the twenties and was sealed off instead of rebuilt.” I wrapped both hands around the mug. “I know Garrett wants it open as an inn by May, which is insane, and that he’s paying me enough not to say so.”

June nodded slowly, as if I’d passed half a test.

“That’s the house,” she said. “I asked if you knew the story.”

The waitress — a teenager with a nose ring and the air of someone serving a sentence — put a slice of blueberry pie in front of me without being asked. June had apparently ordered it for me. I didn’t have the energy to be annoyed.

“Elias Wren,” June said. “The son. He built most of that house with his own two hands — the father drew it, but Elias carved it. Every bit of trim in that place, every newel post, every little bird. He was engaged to a girl named Clara Bell, prettiest girl in the county, the story goes. And on the second of November, 1924, the night before their wedding, the east wing went up in flames. They found Elias’s body in the ashes. They never found Clara.”

“So he died in a fire,” I said. “That’s a tragedy. That’s not a murder.”

“The town decided otherwise.” June dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “His brother Thomas said Elias had been drinking, that they’d quarreled, that Clara had meant to break it off. Everyone believed he killed her, hid her somewhere, and set the fire to cover it. Thomas inherited the house and sold it within the year, and there hasn’t been an owner since who’s lasted longer than a winter.”

“Because of the ghost,” I said, flatly.

“Because of the ghost,” June agreed, not flatly at all.

I ate a bite of pie. It was, unfortunately, very good.

“Mrs. Haskett—”

“June.”

“June. I’ve worked on fourteen historic houses. Every single one of them had a ghost according to somebody. I’ve never met one.” I set the fork down. “Old houses make noises. The wood moves. The pipes knock. People hear what they’re afraid of.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Not unkindly. It was the look of someone reading a letter that had been left out in the rain.

“And what are you afraid of, Nora Whitlock?”

I paid for both slices of pie and left.

Wren Hollow sat at the end of a mile of gravel road that had been paved once, a long time ago, by someone with optimism. The trees closed in on either side — spruce and birch and bare black maples — and then, all at once, they stopped, and there was nothing but granite and wind and the dull iron shine of the Atlantic, and the house.

I pulled over and cut the engine and just looked.

I’d seen photographs. Garrett had emailed me forty of them, most taken on a phone by someone who didn’t know which end of it to point. None of them had prepared me for the size of it, or for the way it stood against the sky — three stories of shingle and gable and ornament, the turret rising on the western corner like a question it was tired of asking. The paint had long since weathered to the gray of driftwood. Half the shutters were gone. The wraparound porch sagged on the north side like a tired shoulder.

And the east wing was black.

Not painted black. Burned. A hundred years of rain had not washed it clean. The windows there were boarded, and the boards had been boarded over, and someone had nailed a sheet of tin across what must once have been a door.

It was, without question, the most beautiful house I had ever seen.

I know how that sounds. But that’s the job. You don’t restore houses because they’re pretty. You restore them because you can see what they were, underneath what they’ve become. You fall in love with the bones.

Daniel used to say I liked houses better than people.

He was right. Houses don’t leave.

I got out of the truck.

Garrett Pell met me on the porch, keys in one hand and phone in the other, and I learned three things about him in the first thirty seconds: he had very white teeth, he wore loafers without socks in October in Maine, and he was scared of the house.

He hid it well. He talked fast about square footage and heated floors and a spa in what he called “the burn zone,” and he didn’t once step over the threshold.

“Everything you need is inside,” he said, handing me the keys. There were a lot of them. Old iron ones on a ring the size of my palm, and a new brass one for the padlock on the cellar. “Power’s on. Water’s on. Heat’s — well, there’s heat in the kitchen and two of the bedrooms. Your guy Alvarez starts Monday. I’ll be back up in three weeks to see progress.”

“You’re not going to walk me through?”

“You’re the expert.” His smile flashed. “Besides, I’ve got a closing in Portland at four.”

It was two-fifteen. Portland was ninety minutes away.

“Mr. Pell,” I said. “Have you ever actually been inside?”

He was already walking down the steps toward his car. He lifted a hand without turning around.

“Welcome to Wren Hollow, Ms. Whitlock!”

I’ll say this for the house: it did not try to charm me.

The front door stuck, then gave all at once, and I stumbled into a hall that smelled of dust and salt and cold ashes. Gray light came down through the stairwell from somewhere high above. The staircase was enormous — a double-return with a landing halfway up, and on the landing, a stained-glass window I’d seen in one of Garrett’s blurry photos and dismissed as reproduction.

It was not a reproduction.

It was a wren. A small brown bird on a branch of apple blossom, rendered in glass so old it had thickened at the bottom of each pane. The afternoon light came through it in amber and rose and green, and lay across the stairs like something spilled.

I stood there longer than I should have.

Then I got to work.

I have a ritual, when I walk into a new house. I go room by room with a notebook and a flashlight, and I don’t touch anything. I just look. I let it tell me what hurts.

Wren Hollow had a lot to say.

Water damage in the northwest corner of the parlor, where a gutter had failed decades ago. Dry rot in the porch joists. Three windows cracked, one missing. Mouse droppings in the butler’s pantry. Plaster lathing exposed in a bedroom on the second floor where a ceiling had given up. All normal. All fixable.

And the wood.

God, the wood.

Every doorframe was carved. Not machine-turned, the way most houses of that era were trimmed, but carved by hand — ivy and oak leaves and twisting ribbon, and scattered through it all, where you’d never notice unless you looked, small birds. A wren on a newel post. A wren hidden in the ivy on the library mantel. A wren tucked into the corner of a window casing, no bigger than my thumbnail, its head turned as if it had just heard its name.

I found nineteen of them before the light started to go.

I also found the clocks.

There was one in the hall — a tall case clock in walnut, taller than me. There was a mantel clock in the parlor and a little brass carriage clock in the library and a kitchen clock with a cracked face. Four clocks. None of them ran, which wasn’t surprising.

All four of them had stopped at 11:14.

That was surprising.

I stood in front of the tall case clock in the hall and looked at its hands for a long time. Then I opened the case, found the key hanging inside where it should be, wound it, and set the pendulum swinging.

It ticked eleven times. Then it stopped.

Eleven-fourteen.

“Old movement,” I said out loud, to no one. “Dry bushings. Needs oil.”

My voice sounded very small in that hall.

I set up camp in the one bedroom on the second floor that had a working radiator and a door that closed. It was a big square room at the front of the house, with a four-poster bed stripped to the ropes, a fireplace with a carved surround, and a window seat that looked out over the sea. I dragged my air mattress in and laid it down on the floor beside the bed, because I’m not an idiot and I wasn’t sleeping on hundred-year-old ropes.

I ate a granola bar for dinner. I texted my sister.

Maggie: are you alive

Me: Alive. House is incredible. Town is weird. Someone told me it’s haunted within 11 min.

Maggie: is it

Me: It’s a house, Mags.

Maggie: ok but if a ghost shows up ask it what it’s like. for science

Maggie: also eat something that isn’t a granola bar

Maggie: love you. call me sunday. I mean it nora

I didn’t answer that last one. I put the phone face down on the floor and turned off the lantern and lay there listening to the house.

Old houses do make noises. I wasn’t lying to June about that. The wood expands and contracts with the temperature; the joists pop; the wind finds every gap in the siding and plays it like a reed. Wren Hollow was no different. It creaked and ticked and sighed. Somewhere below me a shutter banged, and banged, and stopped.

And somewhere else — I couldn’t tell where — there was a sound I knew.

Shhhk. Shhhk. Shhhk.

A plane on wood. A hand plane, the long smooth stroke of a sharp blade taking a curl off a board. I’d heard that sound every day of my childhood in my grandfather’s shop in Somerville. I’d know it anywhere.

Shhhk.

I sat up.

It stopped.

I told myself it was the wind. I told myself it was a branch against a clapboard. I lay back down and pulled the sleeping bag up to my chin and did the thing I’d been doing every night for eighteen months, which was count backward from a thousand so I wouldn’t think about the sound of rain on a windshield, or a deer’s eyes in headlights, or Daniel saying Nora, slow down, in the last voice I ever heard him use.

I got to six hundred and forty-two before I slept.

In the morning, there was a curl of fresh wood on the stairs.

It was on the fourth step from the bottom. Pale and clean, the length of my finger, curled like a ribbon. I picked it up and smelled it. Cherry. New-cut cherry, still sweet.

There wasn’t a piece of raw cherry anywhere in the house. I’d checked every room.

I put it in my pocket and didn’t mention it to anyone, because who would I mention it to? I spent the day measuring. I spent the day on the phone with a lumber yard in Bangor and a glazier in Portland and a man named Ben Alvarez, who had a voice like a slow river and said yes ma’am and no ma’am and, when I told him the east wing would need assessment, went quiet for a long moment and said, “I’ll do anything you need in that house, Ms. Whitlock. But I don’t go in the east wing.”

“Why not?”

“My grandfather didn’t. My dad didn’t.” A pause. “I’m not going to be the one who finds out why.”

By nightfall I was tired enough to sleep standing up. I skipped the granola bar. I skipped texting Maggie. I lay down on the air mattress in the front bedroom and was gone before I’d counted past nine hundred.

I don’t know what woke me.

It was very late, or very early. The radiator had gone cold. The moon had come out and laid a long white rectangle across the floorboards, and the room was full of that particular silence that feels like someone has just stopped talking.

There was a man standing at the window.

He had his back to me. He was tall, with dark hair that curled over the collar of a white shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbow. He was looking out at the sea. He was so still, and so clearly there, that for one long, stupid second my only thought was Garrett gave someone else a key.

Then the moonlight moved through him, and laid itself on the floor, and did not stop.

I didn’t scream. I want that on the record. I didn’t scream, and I didn’t move, and I didn’t breathe.

He turned his head. Not all the way — just enough that I could see the line of his jaw, the edge of a cheekbone, one dark eye catching the light.

“You’re sleeping,” said Elias Wren, in a low, courteous, entirely exasperated voice, “in my room.”