even larger house had once stood on the site, the cornerstone of a sprawling tobacco and lumber plantation. The first time Drum had brought Carrie home, his mother had pulled out an album of old sepiatone photographs to impress his new bride with the history of the clan into which she’d somehow finagled herself. One showed an earlier generation of MacNeils standing before a grandiose Greek Revival mansion, complete with Ionic columns, a full-width front porch, and weeping magnolias lining both sides of a long and stately gravel drive—sort of a Virginia version of Tara.
But after the insult of the Civil War, the plantation had never really recovered its former glory. When the big house had burned down during the economic depression of the 1890s, Drum’s great-grandfather had rebuilt a smaller place on the same site, looking across the river to Maryland and, downstream, to the heights of Georgetown.
At the time of the fire, there’d been whispers that old Elcott MacNeil had torched the place for the insurance money. It was certainly coincidental that a number of irreplaceable items, including those rare old photographs, the family bible, and a few of the better pieces of furniture just happened to be out on loan or away for refurbishing when the fire broke out. Virginia gentlemen, however, do not publicly accuse one another of arson, especially when the gentleman under suspicion is an ardent supporter of the incumbent political party. And old Elcott MacNeil, solvent once more, was certainly in a position to be generous—all the more so when the federal government showed a sudden interest in buying up his tired plantation acreage for parkland and home sites for senior Union officers.
Elcott MacNeil was also one of the chief advocates for the construction of the Great Falls and Old Dominion Railroad. Built at the turn of the last century, the railroad had drawn vacationers from the miasma of Washington summers, as well as year-round residents from among those government officials in the upper levels of a burgeoning federal bureaucracy who preferred to live outside the capital. Of course, railroad access to northern Virginia had only increased the value of the MacNeil acreage, which had been mostly sold off, forming the basis of the family’s wealth ever since.
Over the years, the replacement house had been expanded in architecturally tasteful bits and pieces, becoming the new seat of the dynasty. If the old plantation with its rolling drive was gone, the house and its prime location still marked the MacNeil family as Fairfax County gentry.
Carrie tiptoed past her mother-in-law’s closed door on her way to the guest bathroom. Althea had moved out of the master bedroom when Drum had announced their return from London. Carrie would have been happier if she would have stayed put, but Althea had insisted on moving into her daughter’s old room down the hall. By the time the family arrived back in town, the switch was a fait accompli.
“This house is really Drum’s now, anyway,” she told Carrie as she showed off new burgundy and pink floral bed linens, drapes and matching lampshades she’d bought for the heavy, carved walnut bedroom suite that was now to be theirs.
The walls had been newly painted in a matching shade of dark burgundy that to Carrie’s eye resembled dried blood. With its dark Victorian furnishings and heavy floral draperies, the room, despite its size, felt claustrophobic and funereal. But now that it had been redecorated especially for their arrival, Carrie knew there was no question of touching a thing in it without causing grievous offense to her mother-in-law.
“But there’s no reason for you to give up your bedroom, Althea,” she protested. “Drum and I were fine in the room we had before.”
“Oh, no. He works so hard. He needs his rest, and the master bedroom is so much quieter than the ones at the front of the house. You don’t hear the street noises back there at all.”
The house sat on an acre of land on a riverfront culde-sac which had only five homes on it, all with equally large lots. The small, exclusive neighborhood had been carved out of a parklike wedge of land at the end of Chain Bridge Road, but the way Althea spoke of street noises, Carrie thought, a person might think the house was smack in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
“We’ve never been bothered by noise,” she told her mother-in-law. “And you always say what a light sleeper you are. Wouldn’t you be better off staying put?”
Althea would not be moved. “No, this is yours now. I’ll be fine in Ellie’s old room. I’m sure I’ll get used to the noise in time.”
And she did seem to be coping admirably, Carrie thought. Despite the racket made by those few well-tuned luxury cars that constituted morning rush hour in this quiet neighborhood, her mother-in-law’s room seemed dark and silent when Carrie passed her door, as it was most mornings at this hour. Althea almost never rose before ten. Carrie was anxious that this day not prove the exception to the rule.
From the guest room window, she peered out over the street, trying to judge what the weather would bring that day. No surprises there. Thick haze filtering the early morning light told her it would be another hot and sticky one.
A semicircular driveway covered in crushed white rock led from the house’s porticoed front door to the edge of Elcott Road. At the curb, bluebottle flies were flitting lazily around the lids of the fifty-gallon trash bins Carrie had wheeled out the night before—a gray one for regular garbage, green for garden waste, and a blue bin for recyclables. Up and down the street, identical tri-colored trios of bins dotted the ends of other well-manicured drives, the only sign that the pristine neighborhood housed real people with normal requirements for food, drink and bathroom products.
Across the road, a green van sat in the driveway of Bernice and Morrie Klein’s house. The old couple had lived opposite the MacNeils for thirty years now, but they were getting on. Carrie had seen them only once or twice since she and Drum and Jonah had returned from London—and not at all in the last few weeks, she suddenly realized. Maybe she should run over and check on them? If their cleaning service was there, though, they must be all right.
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