Moonrise. Cassandra King

belonged to another woman before I came along. Foolishly, naively, I thought that wouldn’t matter. I wanted so desperately to be welcomed and embraced that I believed I could make it happen. Wouldn’t it be obvious that I not only loved Emmet but also everything else: this old house with its ruined gardens, the gently lapping lake below, the cloud-shrouded mountains surrounding us? I’d expected to be loved in return, and to be entrusted with their care. What I didn’t expect was to remain apart, separated by a barrier of mistrust and suspicion. Instead I’m the outsider, the one who doesn’t belong. And it’s making me a bit crazy, especially at night, in this room. Her room. At times I even imagine she’s the one who calls my name.

      With a sigh, I lean into the window frame and stare down at the shadowy gardens below. They were once magnificent, I’ve been told. In their glory days, the gardens were known far and wide for their unique beauty. Pebbled walkways formed intricate paths through flowering beds, around fountains and statuary, beside koifilled ponds before tapering off to terraces extending halfway down the mountain. Now the pathways are overgrown and indistinguishable from the weed-choked flower beds. Neglected, the koi have died, and the fountains dried up. Since the untimely death of Emmet’s first wife, the once-glorious and much-heralded gardens tended for generations by her family have gone to ruin.

      In stark contrast, the grounds in front of the house remain intact, the lawns manicured, the formal beds and topiary pruned to perfection. You can approach the house from the lake without even being aware of the ruined gardens in back. I certainly wasn’t, when I got here at the beginning of summer. Coming up the long driveway through a leafy tunnel of rhododendron, you emerge to find the house suddenly looming in front of you. Set in the midst of wide lawns and stately hemlocks, the stone house with its ivy-clad walls appears to have sprung from the mountainside. It’s a sight that once drew flocks of tourists to this area.

      I had heard little of the history of Moonrise before I came here. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so eager to come if I’d known more, though that’s pretty unlikely. I’ve always been overly imaginative, and way too romantic for my own good. It’s a part of my nature that has caused me not just a lot of disenchantment but also considerable grief. From the first moment I heard about Moonrise it became an obsession. Emmet grew alarmed when he saw my obsession taking hold, and who could blame him? After all, I was asking him to take me to a place he didn’t want to go, a place and time he’d tried to put behind him. I think he finally agreed to bring me here as a sure way of curing me . . . or so he thought.

      Maybe Emmet deserves some of the blame, too. If only he’d told me more about his former life, things might have turned out differently. I might not be huddled by the window, shivering in the cold after being chased out of my bed yet again by the night noises. I would’ve known more of what to expect here. Although Emmet is a verbose newsman known for his in-depth interviews, he clams up on personal matters. At first I was suspicious, sure he was hiding something from me, something too terrible to discuss. My overactive imagination caused me to wonder if I’d come to hate him after discovering whatever it was—a crazy wife in the attic, or a murdered one at the bottom of the lake. Then I wondered if I was being insensitive. Was his grief simply too raw, and his reluctance to discuss it only natural?

      Emmet stirs in the bed, and I hold my breath until he settles back into sleep. I don’t want him to catch me prowling around in the dark again. He’s growing impatient with me, and I can’t blame him for that, either. I was the one who insisted we spend the summer at Moonrise. He tried to talk some sense into me. Let’s give everyone a little more time to get used to the idea of us, he’d said. His late wife had been dead less than a year, and our marriage had been sudden, unexpected. Everyone would come to love me, he was sure, but we should expect a bit of reticence at first. It was only natural, considering. At the end of August, said my sensible, reasonable husband, he’d take me to Moonrise for a week or so. Would that appease me?

      No, it would not. Looking back, it astonishes me how stubborn I was, and how insistent. I’ve never been that way before. Like most women of my generation, I was raised to be a pleaser. Southern women don’t make many demands, especially of their men. But I made it clear that I wanted the two of us to spend the summer at Moonrise, and refused to settle for less.

      At home in Fort Lauderdale, I presented my case: A summer away from the miserable heat of south Florida would be good for both of us. Since Emmet had never lived in Florida, he had no idea how brutal our summers could be. And I’d never spent any length of time in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’d be cool at Moonrise, blissfully so, and wonderfully peaceful. Everything I’d heard about the little town of Highlands, where Moonrise was located, enticed me. And the house, I’d been told, had been vacant too long. The gardens were in ruins and the house was showing signs of neglect. Give us three months, and I felt sure we could restore everything to its former glory.

      At that point in my argument, Emmet had placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. “Helen,” he’d said with a heavy sigh, “I wish to God you’d never found that damned photograph album.”

      I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and embraced him, the tension between us dissipating as it always did when we held each other. He was right; that damned album had started it. I’d found it in a box of his things I unpacked when we moved in together, a collection of photos his late wife had begun putting into a scrapbook. Only a few pages at the beginning were filled; the rest were conspicuously, tragically blank.

      Emmet’s response to my discovery of the album had caught me off guard. I’d been so sure he’d be pleased by my find that I’d barged into his office, something I never did. When we first married, I’d asked for photos in order to put faces with the names of his family and friends, whom I had yet to meet. Although I’d force-marched him through all of my family albums, his only contribution had been a few framed pictures of his daughter. With a shrug, Emmet told me that everything from his former life had either been put away or given to his daughter. When I found the album and photos I assumed he’d forgotten, he flinched but tolerated my questions. Yes, that was Rosalyn by the lake, on the dock sunbathing, pulling weeds in the gardens. And the others, their friends of so many years; couldn’t I guess who was who by the descriptions he’d given me? His eyes softened at an old picture of his daughter on her pony. She was ten in the picture, Emmet told me with a smile, and that pony turned out to be mean as hell. Horses, it was always horses with Annie, even then. But that was the extent of his indulgence, and he pushed away from his desk abruptly.

      No question, finding the album started my obsession with Moonrise, the grand old estate with the wonderfully romantic name. Until then, I’d known little about the place, just that it was where Emmet had “summered” in his previous life, before he moved to Florida and met me. Located in western North Carolina, the property had belonged to the family of Emmet’s late wife, Rosalyn, and had become his by default when she died. I didn’t know anyone with a cabin in the mountains, much less an estate. It shames me now to remember how impressed I was, and how thrilled at the thought of having a mountain home of my own. I admitted to Emmet that it was something I’d always dreamed of having. Florida does that to you, I think. Living in a perpetual state of summer makes you long for changing seasons.

      Only after we married did Emmet admit that Moonrise was an albatross around his neck, a burden he didn’t quite know how to handle. A magnificent estate in its day, it had lapsed into a sorry state after Rosalyn’s death. The property was tied up in a trust that barely provided for its upkeep, yet made unloading it next to impossible. He couldn’t afford it, nor could he bear to give it up. Although Moonrise held nothing but bad memories for him, Emmet wanted it for his daughter. And her mother would’ve wanted that even more. It had been Rosalyn, not Emmet or Annie, who had loved Moonrise so fervently, much more so than their home in Atlanta. Foolishly, carelessly, Rosalyn had not anticipated that Emmet, a few years older and in a highly stressful career, would outlive her and end up burdened with her beloved estate. If so, surely she wouldn’t have brushed off her lawyers’ pleas to take care of things lest the unthinkable happened.

      Alone, poring over the snapshots in the album, I decided that Emmet had taken the pictures. Not only was he into photography, the pictures were black and white, his favorites to shoot. Most of them were taken from a distance, which I found