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    On Winding Hill Road

"Stacy, come look at this." Russ waved to me from a doorway on the second floor. "This bathroom looks like it was added. It's old, but it's later than the original construction. Look at this door detail. This kind of stuff cracks me up. They didn't even bother trying to match the trim here."

"Put this in Architectural Digest," I said, tapping the countertop, which was covered with plastic shelf paper, yellow with brown butterflies. "What was underneath that contact paper must have been really bad if this was considered an improvement."

"You're just too darned fussy, girl." Russ fluffed the hair on the top of my head. "Wow." He stopped, frozen. "Will you look at that? An honest-to-God cast iron claw-foot bathtub. Ooh, baby."

"There's another one in the bath down the hall," I told him. "And look, all the doors have these beautiful glass doorknobs."

"Which probably don't work very well."

The house was large enough to get lost in. Various additions and "improvements" had turned the rear of the building into a labyrinth of stairways, halls, closets, and curious rooms all jumbled together and strange, but somehow it retained a curious charm, like a child's building-block castle. There were some peculiar details here and there, like the contact-paper countertop, but we found interesting little windows in the stairwell, beautiful cabinetry and woodwork throughout the house, and whimsical oddities in the architecture that showed a graceful, if eccentric, hand in design. Russ and I explored the place, cracking jokes when Iona wasn't near enough to hear us. Russ enjoyed riffing on the construction flaws in any building he happened to visit, and this old house provided plenty of material for comedy.

"Come look at this," Iona called. We were all up on the second floor. "This bedroom is just grand, isn't it?"

"Just grand." Russ mouthed Iona's words, affecting a foppish pose. I gave him a slug on the arm as I passed him going through the doorway into the bedroom.

The room was grand. Or it had been, once. There was a lovely, ragged old four-poster bed with finials carved to look like pine cones. A neoclassical writing desk stood on its four straight legs in the curved bay window, one of the few windows in the house not fixed with dark coverings. Through the branches of the big black oak I could see the strange white house in the meadow, its three dormer windows set into its wide gray roof, giving it the look of a face gazing back at me.

"This must have been her room, I suppose," said Iona. I turned away from the window and looked over the room again. Against the far wall stood a heavy dresser with a smoky mirror, its drawers open and spilling out old clothing and papers. I crossed the room slowly, feeling the creak of the floorboards beneath my feet, drawn to the mirror. I felt compelled to see if I had changed since I had come into this house. I felt as if I had.

My eyes, flashing back at me in the mirror, were larger and darker than usual, somehow balancing a brow that often seemed too fierce. There was an expression of unnatural glowing about my eyes, as if I had ingested amphetamines. Dark tangled curls set off an unfamiliar face, like a frame around a pale cameo, glowing indistinct and ghostly in the old silvered glass. The gothic wildness of my image in the mirror was so different from how I usually pictured myself-business - like, neat, professional - that I was startled and actually wondered for a moment if it was me.

"Boo. "

I let out a yelp and jumped, bumping into the large warm male body.

Russ. His handsome sunburned face appeared suddenly next to mine in the mirror.

"Kinda jumpy, aren't ya?" he grinned.

I shoved him away. "Don't do that to me, Russ," I snapped at him.

"Come on, Narcissus," he said, pulling me away from my own reflection, linking his arm through mine. "There's lots more to see in this fun house."

Downstairs, at the far end of the house, we found a paneled library with a stone fireplace, floor- to-ceiling bookcases of mellow aged cherry, exquisite handcrafted cabinetry, a marble fireplace and, beneath the piles of junk and layers of grime, a floor of black and white marble tile set in a classic pattern of large and small diamonds. Arched windows topped two sets of double French doors leading out to a stone terrace. It was a wonderful space, marred only by a large green-painted plywood closet, which had been constructed in the corner of the room with no thought to styling nor quality of building materials. Pity, I thought, the green closet spoiled the look of the room. But it could be removed. Russ would say: "We have the technology."

But did we have the technology? Or rather, did I have the money, not to mention the heart - you'd need a strong one - to make this place right again?

"Think about it, Stacy - the golf course, swimming pool, weight room, private decks overlooking the bay, gardeners once a week. . . " Justin's voice invaded my thoughts again, but this time it was memory, rather than fantasy. He had wanted us to buy a house in an exclusive gated community we had been invited to join. We had come awfully close - visiting the model homes together on several occasions, talking to real estate agents, checking out financing. But somehow it had never happened. Justin grew angry with me, accusing me of "dropping the ball" with the loan people, with the paperwork - and after all, he was right. I didn't make it happen. I thought wistfully of the clean, easy life we might have led, the two of us, with the pool, the weight room, the gardeners. I had been tempted, but repelled, too. I told myself that was natural. Fear of change, and all that. But increasingly Justin was impatient. He wanted to live with me, he said. But I found myself becoming bitter toward him, that he would press for this move without offering or asking for any sort of commitment on a deeper level. Oh, sometimes he talked about marriage and having kids, but only in the most lighthearted, even cynical, way. Like it was something other people did, people who weren't that bright.

Certainly if I bought this property, this old apple ranch, any opportunity for buying into that gated community with Justin would be effectively finished. The very idea of sinking money into this white elephant was just the sort of folly that would tax Justin's sensibilities. But to me it was a thrilling prospect, full of potential. I could do something with this place, I thought.

I opened one of the French doors and drank in the air, such a contrast to the air in the house, delicious, fragrant, touched with the chill of late October. The terrace stepped down to a ragged lawn surrounded by the forest. I descended the stone staircase, following a pathway overgrown with blackberry, in places so thick and thorny the vines had taken over the path so that it was completely obscured and impassable. I had hoped to inspect the exterior of the house, but I couldn't get a good look at it for the tangle of vine and trees. The house was so large and rambling and the woods so thick against it, I couldn't walk all the way around the building. There appeared to be no vantage point from which to see the entire structure as a whole. I found it frustrating, yet intriguing. It was a mystery house, impenetrable. Sleeping Beauty's castle.

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