Free Amber House by Kelly Moore Page A

flow, her heedless whim, to thy commands.
Thus heal the wound; thus make all good amends.
Hast thou a chance to choose it all again,
Then take the path that leads to otherwhen.
     
    So, what was that even supposed to mean? Did she actually, literally think time could be changed, or was I just missing the metaphor? “Otherwhen,” huh. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised that the woman had spent some time in an asylum.
    She’d laid out sort of a family tree — “Families of Amber House,” in which she listed all my ancestors who had actually owned the property, starting with the pair Richard had mentioned, Liam and Sorcha O’Malley. I found Deirdre Foster in the mid-seventeen hundreds, four generations later, and her husband, Captain Foster of the whale ivory and weapon obsessions, who had evidently been married to someone else before the unfortunate Deirdre. My eye ran past a roll call of solid American names: Tate and Webster, Gideon and Quincy, with a Maeve McCallister for some more Irish leavening. Maeve proved to be Fiona’s grandmother. The tree ended with Fiona’s daughter — my grandmother — Ida Warren. I guessed she was the last to be born before the book was published, and as Fiona’s only child, the one who had been destined to be the next owner of Amber House. My mother would be the last. I would never belong to that group.
    My eyelids were sagging. It wasn’t even eight o’clock back home. I closed the book and leaned forward, intending to rest my head on my arm for just a minute.
    And I dreamed.
    The priest stood over Gramma’s grave, reminding us there was indeed “a time for everywhen under the sun.” Gramma stood beside him, watching me, a little smile on her face.
    The black-coated women were gone, but other women were there, dressed strangely, standing before different headstones all over the graveyard. Each of them was watching me. Gramma said, “One day you’ll be here too.”
    I tried to say, “Never,” but the word wouldn’t come from my mouth.
    I seemed to hear an echo of voices, rising, “Sarah, Sarah —”

 
    “Sarah.”
    I jerked upright, the sound of many voices still in my ears. It took me a second to understand I was sitting in my gramma’s kitchen.
    Jackson poked his head in the door. “Sorry.” He smiled. “Couldn’t stay awake? I thought you said it was only eight thirty your time.”
    I cursed myself for being a lightweight. “Must have been all that exercise I got this afternoon, running through your tick-infested woods.”
    “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You’re sitting smack in the middle of the tick capital of the nation, if not the world.” He closed the door behind him. “The trick to avoiding them,” he said, flipping up the hood on the sweatshirt he was wearing to demonstrate, “is body armor.” He grinned, pushed the hood back down, and unzipped his jacket. “Where are we going to start?”
    “Why don’t we go up the main stairs to the third floor? I haven’t been up there yet. Have you?”
    “No. Let’s go.”
    We crept quietly out of the kitchen and up the stairs. After we passed the second-floor landing, the staircase turned once and became instantly utilitarian. The narrow steps ended on the third floor in a short hall with three closed doors. I opened the first one on the right.
    Light from a moon one-third full illumined the room, which held just four things: a small table, a chair before it, a standingbrass lamp, and a small glass-fronted bookcase filled with identical slim leather-bound volumes. Something to come back to , I thought.
    The door to the left opened on an old and dusty scene of chaos: a broken easel knocked on its side, still clamping a torn canvas that was once a pretty landscape, and a case full of paint tubes spilled on the floor, their guts stomped out.
    On the other side of the third door, our stabbing lights revealed a long, narrow garret room, with a slanted ceiling and a single window at the far end. Midway down the