A little while later, Grace discovered that her beloved had married someone else.
That night she put on a wedding dress she’d made in secret. (How do you make a wedding dress in secret?)
She ran out of the house. (How?) Two servants chased after her.
Before they could catch her, she leaped into the river and was carried away.
No one noticed the girl in the mural until a few days later.
The artist had vanished by that time. (How’d she know what was going to happen???)
Frederick Louth blamed himself for his daughter’s death.
He died of a heart attack while trying to destroy the mural he’d commissioned.
Mrs. Louth never came back to the manor.
People say the house is cursed. It preys on the weak, and young women are its favorite victims. In Louth, they’re called the Dead Girls.
I call bullshit.
What really happened to Grace?
I read Lark’s notes over and over, lingering each time on the last three lines. I’d been right. Lark hadn’t believed the official story. She’d been searching for the truth about Grace Louth—just as I was trying to figure out what had happened to Lark. She knew there had to be more to the story, and that, not mental illness, had been the reason for Lark’s obsession. The discovery thrilled me. Still, I felt a twinge of jealousy. No one had ever bothered to look into my story.
I turned the page and discovered a picture of Grace’s parents on their wedding day. Clara Louth, dressed in a white gown, sat on a plush chair with her husband standing guard behind it. Frederick was a short, stocky man with a mustache that probably hid most of his face for a reason. His willowy wife appeared decades younger, and I had a hunch Clara was sitting down to disguise the fact that she was taller than her husband. People didn’t smile much in photos back then, but Clara looked ready to burst into tears. Even before I read Lark’s notes, I knew it hadn’t been a love match.
Frederick Louth and his happy bride, 1870.
Frederick grew up poor and made a killing in coal.
Literally a killing. Thousands of men died in his mines.
Clara was from a fancy New York family with a dwindling fortune.
Clara’s family traded her in for big bucks. Frederick got respectability.
He was 45. She was 19.
The manor was her wedding present.
The people who worked here hated Frederick. People still talk about him in Louth.
He was cruel to his workers, and he didn’t treat Clara much better.
They spent their first night together here at the manor.
Looks like she would have preferred to throw herself into the river.
The photos that followed showed Clara’s wedding present being built. I found them fascinating. I’d come to think of the manor as an ancient part of the landscape. I couldn’t have imagined the hill without it. Yet there it was, a bald patch of dirt, with every last trace of nature stripped away. Then, picture by picture, a skeletal frame emerged from the mud, and the mansion began to take form. Its white, perfectly stacked blocks looked awkward and out of place.
Lark had commented on only one of the photos, a picture of the completed manor as the gardens around it were being constructed. In the picture, gardeners were weaving strands of ivy through a massive metal trellis fixed to the front of the house.
Frederick must have decided his house looked a little too new.
He couldn’t wait for the manor to age gracefully, so he cheated.
Seems ivy is perfect for social climbing.
The next photo showed the results of the gardeners’ work. The transformation was remarkable. With its face covered in ivy, the brand-new house magically appeared at least a hundred years old. The photographer had captured a woman wandering through the manor’s newly planted garden, a hand resting upon her swollen belly. The brim of her hat threw a shadow across her face, but I was certain the woman was Clara Louth, which meant the baby she was carrying would have been Grace.
The last picture of the manor had been taken eighteen years later, shortly after that baby died. It was published alongside an article in a New York newspaper following Grace’s funeral. According to the story, you could see what many believed to be the ghost of Grace Louth lurking behind the rose room’s windows. I’d already come across the photo online. There did appear to be a blurry, veiled figure standing in what was now my bedroom. But it could just as easily have been a trick of the light.
Then I turned to the next page of the scrapbook and gasped. Pasted to the paper was an enhanced close-up of the phantom’s face. I don’t know what digital witchcraft Lark had used, but the features were now clear enough to identify. I saw Grace Louth’s piercing eyes staring out from behind the veil. The caption Lark had written below the picture was two words long. That’s her. The girl who’d appeared to me had kept her face hidden. But the dress she’d been wearing had looked much the same.
I skipped over an old photo of the town of Louth and read through the obituaries for all three members of Grace’s family. In 1916, Clara Louth was the last of the family to die. She’d moved to Europe following her husband’s death at the hands of the rose room’s mural. According to Lark’s notes, she’d ordered that the painting be preserved, but she refused to return to the house. After she kicked the bucket, the house passed to a series of nephews, none of whom ever set foot in the manor—or touched the mural—for fear of the famous curse. Over the next seventy years, a series of rich New Yorkers rented the house to throw fabulous parties. Then, in 1986 the house was abruptly closed up, abandoned, and left to rot. Then the last Louth nephew expired, and the manor became the property of New York State. Shortly after that, my uncle James showed up and bought it.
Only four photos in Lark’s scrapbook covered the years between 1916 and 1986. According to Lark, they were of young women in their late teens or early twenties who were rumored to have fallen victim to the manor’s curse. The first photo was a black-and-white of a sultry girl with dark hair and a cupid’s-bow mouth.
Violet Jennings stayed at the mansion in the summer of 1921. She’s said to have jumped off a bridge the following winter.
If she did, it didn’t kill her. According to her obituary, she lived to 96.
The second picture was a high school yearbook photo of a serious-looking young woman with chunky black glasses and a Peter Pan collar.
Shirley Hill stayed at the mansion in the summer of 1940. She’s supposed to have thrown herself into the Hudson, Grace Louth–style.