Chapter One

 

"And there it is."

Lexi looked out the window and saw the house coming into view well past the tall iron fence.

"It's huge!" she said.

"Big jobs mean big money," her father said.

She took off her rimless glasses and looked again, then pulled up her phone to take a picture. Of course, since she was far-sighted she had to then put her glasses on again to see the screen - which was annoying.

"It sure is beautiful," she conceded.

And a daunting idea that they would renovate such a huge house. House? It was more like a hotel! A sprawling old mansion!

The car stopped at the gates. Her father got out and unlocked them, then drove them through and down a bumpy, broken driveway to stop in front of the huge overhanging portico.

She jumped down from the Explorer and looked up at it.

"Lot of work to be done," she said.

"Lot of money to be made doing it," he replied.

She conceded the point. They had never done anything this big before, but there was certainly profit to be had in renovating old buildings, especially under contract to someone else willing to pay for everything.

She followed her father and Step-mother up the stairs to the huge main doors, which her father unlocked. They stepped inside, into darkness mostly, an intimidating darkness. With flashlights darting about, they walked through the main floor, then explored the second and third floors, noting damage and needed repairs.

"Well, what do you think?"

Lexi pursed her lips, not sure what to say. From a distance, the old mansion had seemed awesome. The grounds, though overgrown, had a lot of potential once they were cleaned up. The house had been abandoned for over twenty years, though, and it showed.

Even calling it a mansion was an understatement. It was the kind of country home wealthy barons and earls had once kept in previous centuries. A dozen bedrooms, not counting servant quarters in the attic, fourteen baths, a huge library, drawing rooms, parlors, multiple kitchens, a ballroom and others were spread over three floors and sixty thousand square feet. It also had greenhouses and an orangery.

Every room seemed over-sized, with fifteen-foot high ceilings. Every wall had wallpaper or paint peeling and often rotting floors. It was dark and dusty, with many strange, narrow corridors and pitch-black rooms. Garbage was strewn liberally about, along with the signs of recent animal inhabitants.

"Little elbow grease and it'll look splendid!" her father said.

But then, her father was more than slightly insane.

"If by a little, you mean elbow grease brought in giant tanker trucks," she said. "Many of them."

She gazed around at the lobby. It was enormous, with balconies overlooking it from the second and third floors and a ceiling fifty feet above.

"Once I hire a crew of laborers to come and scrub the place down - ."

"And peel off the old wallpaper and scrape off the old paint, and clear out the bugs and rats," she interjected.

"Yes, and that, and then we can get to work renovating it."

"Furnishing it is going to cost a fortune," Sandra, his second wife, said.

"You love shopping!"

Sandra was tall, blonde and beautiful. Lexi had no idea what she was doing with her father, though the two seemed to get along well enough.

The woman scowled at him now. "Do you have any idea how much furniture will be needed? Is this client of yours willing to settle for modern reproductions or is he going to insist on antiques? Because I'd need to raid every antique shop in the country to find enough, and even then they wouldn't be of the same era."

"He seems like the reasonable sort."

"You said he reminded you of a mass murderer."

"Well, yes, but just because he's got that deep voice and is so serious and he has a sort of... scowl sometimes."

"I've met him," she said. "That's not a scowl, that's the look of a mafia don who's about to offer you a deal you can't refuse."

"And he did," he said with a shrug. "He's willing to pay a lot of money to have me renovate this place and then furnish it."

He glanced at Alexandra.

"And Lexi can help shop."

Lexi made a face. She was more interested in her father's side of the business than her step-mother's. His involved the guts of renovation, from rewiring and plumbing to fixing floors, windows and ceilings. Sandra selected color schemes, artwork and furniture.

"This is a big job," she said.

"Big jobs mean big money," her father said.

"And big problems," Sandra added.

***

Lexi was given the task of charting out the floor plan on her tablet. There was already one on record but her father didn't trust it, and she didn't blame him. The blueprint was a hundred and twenty years old and any number of changes might have been made to it over the years.

Since there was no power, and so no lights, she wore a hardhat with a miner's lamp attached, and bound her long hair up underneath - away from bugs and spiderwebs. She started in the attic, which was enormous, with steeply sloping ceilings, and accessible through two narrow staircases on the north and south sides of the house.

It was hot, stiflingly hot. In fact, the whole house was hot as it sat in the warm sun with no power and all the windows shut tight. The attic, though, was much worse.

She took off the helmet then peeled her light sweater up and off. She was wearing a tank top underneath, but she could still feel the heat starting to make her sweat.

It was quiet and dark and dry as a tomb, with dust covering every surface. The area she was in had obviously been used for storage, and she took several pictures of the old furniture left behind. She also searched for electric outlets and noted their location on the floor plan she was building.

She moved further along into the area which had held servant quarters, which were each small bedrooms just large enough for a bed, a dresser, a small writing desk and chair. All the furniture had been left behind, probably because it was cheap.

In each room she noted where the electric socket was, and whether there was a window and if the window needed to be replaced.

She was literally dripping wet before she had half-finished, with sweat trickling down her forehead, and down the inside of her shirt. She finished as rapidly as she could, then gasped with relief when she reached the next floor down. It was still hot, but nothing like the attic.

She made her way down the hall, inside and out of the rooms, and down side corridors which led to cupboards, closets and workrooms, as well as bathrooms. Then the second floor, which was easier principally because all the rooms were enormous, so there were fewer of them.

She was feeling fairly good about her work by the time she finished the first floor. But as she stood at the head of a narrow staircase heading down into the dark pit of the basement she felt fresh doubts. What kind of bugs or rats would she find down here? Could rats even survive here? What would they eat?

The staircase was old, narrow, and creaky. And frankly, spooky. And it got worse when she reached the bottom. The windows were small and covered in dirt and dust, letting in very little light. Her headlamp threw out a beam which lit up the nearby area, but left everything beyond in darkness.

Like the attic, junk had been left behind as being without much value. That included furniture, old lamps, jars full of some moldy stuff on shelves, and boxes she didn't bother to open. Further on she found an enormous old furnace, a giant boiler, empty oil tanks, and an electrical room that looked like it was old when her father was born.

She made her way back up top and found her father in discussion with Sandra about what kind of chandelier to get for the lobby. Which was, to her way of thinking, putting the cart well before the horse. It would be months before they could really even consider putting anything expensive in here.

"Ah, Lexi, good," he said. "You're done?"

She nodded, pulling her helmet off and rubbing the back of her wrist across her sweating forehead.

"I'm heading home," she said. "I need a shower."

"Well, all right, but I want you to stop by and drop a copy of the revised floor plan off at the client."

She opened her mouth to object.

"All you need to do is pass him the file."

"I don't have any... uhm, portable drives or anything."

"I'm sure he has some."

"I'm not exactly presentable!" she objected.

"You've been crawling around a musty, dusty house. He's not a fool. He's not going to expect you to be in a suit."

She scowled but gave in, which she knew, she did all too often.

"It's on the way."

It was not, of course, on the way. It was just in the same general direction. She drove quickly, with the windows open, irritated because the eight-year-old Jeep's air conditioning had been busted for a week now and she hadn't had time to get it fixed.

The client lived in a much more modern and updated version of a mansion, no more than ten thousand square feet or so in size, she thought, sitting on the edge of a river, complete with boathouse and dock. Lexi looked enviously at the water as she drove up and parked alongside a Mercedes SUV.

Why anyone would want to move from this place to that pile of moldering stone was beyond her. She'd love to get up every day and see the river. Yes, the other place had a big pool - once it was cleaned and refurbished, but that wasn't the same thing.

She went up to the door, nervously trying to comb her brown hair back with her fingers. She was sure she looked awful after tramping all over the damned house in the heat.

The door opened before she could knock, and a man looked out at her through disconcertingly blue eyes under thick black eyebrows. He had tousled black hair, a square-jawed face and a light beard and mustache.

Those eyes made for a penetrating gaze and Lexi instantly felt intimidated as they looked at her with a silent demand to justify her presence.

"Uhm, hi," she said. "Mister Stuart?"

He nodded minutely.

"I'm Alexandra Jameson. You asked my father to look into renovating the old Brixmore place?"

He nodded again, then backed up and gestured her to come in.

Lexi licked her lips and stepped through the door to find the lobby here was everything the other lobby was not; bright, clean, beautiful, with polished marble floor and chandelier hanging over a gold and glass table in the center.

"My father asked me to bring you the revised floor plan for the existing structure," she said. "There are only a few changes from the last one."

"What do you think of the place?" he asked.

He had a deep voice, with a kind of exacting tone which brooked no refusal to answer.

"It's uhm, big," she said.

His eyebrow raised, and she flushed.

"I mean, everything about it is very old-school, very high ceilings, the rooms much larger than modern rooms, the corridors wide and long. It's been left alone a long time, though and will need an awful lot of work to bring it up to anything resembling this sort of shape," she said, waving her hand around.

She held up the tablet.

"I can show you on this or email you the plans, unless you have a cable or something to transfer it to you now."

"May I?" he asked.

She handed the tablet to him reluctantly. He looked old, maybe forty. Did old people like that know how to handle technology?

He walked away and she followed, eyes darting around appreciatively at the décor and beauty of the mansion as she followed him into what she supposed was the great room. Certainly it was great, given the height of the ceiling and how big it was, not to mention the huge windows looking out on the river.

Temporarily distracted from what he was doing, she turned to see him doing something with the settings on the tablet.

"Uhm... Mister... Stuart? I uhm, can find the file for you if you..."

He ignored her, tapping something into it, and he was taller than her making it impossible to see what he was doing. Then the wall next to her began to slide up and she saw there was a large flat-screen monitor behind it. The monitor came to life suddenly and she realized he'd tapped into the house's Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and was transferring the file.

It came up on what looked like a one hundred inch screen and he examined it.

"What's this?" he asked.

She saw the pointer resting on one of the rooms on the second floor.

"That's a bathroom," she said.

He squiggled a line across the wall of the bathroom and the adjoining closet.

"Take these out," he said.

He squiggled across the next wall over. "Take this one out."

Now he drew a new line in.

"On the left will be the new bathroom and on the right will be the dressing room."

"Uhm..."

She looked closer at the screen.

"That room was one of the bedrooms," she said.

"It's got plenty to lose."

"Yes, but it was, let me see... thirty by thirty-five feet. When you add in the bathroom and closet that's forty-three feet. So this will give you a bathroom which is about twenty feet wide by thirty feet long, and then a closet which is twenty-three feet by thirty."

She looked at him expectantly. Her expectation being his understanding that was far too much space. Instead he looked back steadily.

"I mean... that's a pretty big bathroom," she said, since he didn't seem to be understanding.

"Come with me," he said.

He walked out of the room and she followed down a corridor, then up a flight of stairs to the second floor. Her eyes kept darting around in admiration. This was some kind of house! He led her into a bedroom, and then, walking past a huge four-poster bed, into a... bathroom.

Lexi stared at it in astonishment. She'd never seen a bathroom as enormous as this, with a huge curving shower cabinet that was so large it had a marble bench and a sink - in case, she supposed, you wanted to have a drink while showering. The tub was an enormous thing with tall posts coming up from the corners, much like the bed in the other room.

"This is kind of gaudy," he said. "But you get the idea, right? The size involved is not unusual."

"I uhm, yeah, I uhm, guess so," she said.

His damn bathroom was bigger than her apartment!

He turned those intimidating eyes on her.

"You haven't done a place for the wealthy before, have you?"

"Well... no."

"Raise your sights. Consider that with enough wealth, money, at least as far as a house goes, is almost no object. For those with more money than they can spend, getting the best is more than worth it, no matter the cost."

"Uhm... yes, sir."

His eyes flicked up and down as he looked at her and for a moment she felt a familiar twinge of anxiety, wondering if this guy would hit on her. But then, he wasn't a guy, he was a man, a really old man, even if he did look to be in really good shape. He looked... strong, in fact.

Very strong.

"The house, I take it, has a lot of accumulated dirt."

She flushed, looking down at herself again.

"Well, yeah," she said.

He ran a large finger along her bare upper arm, where dust clung to her skin.

"And hot, I take it."

"Well, there's no power and the windows are locked tight," she said defensively.

She felt like a grubby urchin fetched up in front of this intimidating and elegantly dressed man. His suit probably cost more than she made in a year!

He looked at her, then at the room.

"Take a shower here," he said.

Lexi's eyes widened and she shook her head. "Oh no, no. I'm on my way home and - ."

"I'm going out. Give your clothes to the maid. She'll have them freshened and dried in twenty minutes.

"No, no, really - ."

He turned those eyes on her. He clearly did not like being told no.

"You don't have any experience with the type of luxury you're going to be working with," he said. "I want you to shower in this room, to let your mind imagine it's yours, to experience the luxury first-hand so you'll be of a better mindset in working on the new place."

"Oh, my father's wife is way better at choosing - ."

"And you'll be assisting her, correct?"

"Well - ."

"Then take some time to get acclimated to the sort of thing I expect."

"But - ."

"I'll send the maid," he said, walking away.

"But... but really!" she called after him.

He was already gone from the bedroom!

Lexi looked around at the place. Take a shower here!? In this... golden palace of a bathroom!? The shower was actually in the middle of the room, not against a wall. It was a huge oval glass thing you could put a bed in!

The counter was off to the right, perhaps fifteen feet long, with double sink and huge mirror. On the other side was a makeup table and mirror, with chair, and past them a room with a door that had a toilet and bidet. Then there was the huge shower, which looked like it was out of some old Roman villa or something.

The maid, a plump Hispanic woman showed up, smiling ingratiatingly. Lexi felt helpless to refuse now. She undressed, passing her clothes to the woman around the nearly closed door, then closed and locked it.

Naked! She was naked in this huge room with massive mirrors all around! And it was so brightly lit too! She bit her lower lip and padded across the floor to the shower cabinet. At first she didn't see how to open it, but then pressed a button and a large piece of the glass wall slid aside.