“After the man killed himself with the hammer, Catherine became convinced that they had opened something up during the endless construction. She claimed she started seeing the dead man around the house, still working, like he didn’t realize he was dead, and in order to get away from his ghost, she had them continue building in a frenzy, a confusion of rooms and doorways and halls to befuddle his spirit so that he would get lost and go away. No one could reach her at this point, not even Arthur.”

I start to back out of the room, relieved when Don doesn’t reach for me again. He follows me out.

“That’s why you call her Mad Catherine?”

“Well, that,” I continue as we walk back slowly toward the main staircase, “and because, after all that, she claimed the house had taken over its own construction: it started mutating, without the builders lifting a finger. She claimed that doorways would spring up out of nowhere, leading to strange places, and that rooms would grow and shrink on their own. Construction finally petered off, while Mad Catherine roamed the halls of her insane mansion—her life’s work, as it were. There were only a few workers left doing some finishing touches, painting and such, and Mad Catherine had started to blame them for what they had done. In a fit of rage, she grabbed one man’s head and pushed it down into a bucket of paint, and she drowned him in it.”

“Jesus. And she got away with it?”

“Oh no,” I assure him. “She was hanged for it. The Wakefields were quite despised and became reclusive after that, particularly Catherine’s son Everett, who rejected society and turned to Quakerism. It was a famous trial, fraught with drama. You can read about it if you look up the old defunct papers from around here. I don’t believe the town has ever really forgotten.”

Don is frowning, now, as he looks up the staircase with distaste.

Feeling as though I’ve regained the upper hand, I smile. “They say you can still see Mad Catherine wandering the halls at night by the light of a single candle, and that the house rearranges itself in her wake, wherever she walks.”

I have no candle, and the staircase looms above me in the dark. Donovan hesitates at its base, and I hope I have unsettled him. Turning to offer a devious grin over my shoulder, I give my cape throw a theatrical flourish, imagining, for a moment, that I am Mad Catherine, and that the house will mutate behind me as I go up the stairs, that I am in control of this place and that it can do me no harm, for I am its master.

“Good night.”

15

Shall I slip a bit of arsenic into her orange juice? Oh, not enough to kill her, although it would likely be enough to make her a bit ill.

Shall I arrange a precarious tumble of books from a high shelf in the library to fall, somehow, onto her waiting protuberant belly?