A Sudden Light: A Novel Read Free

the rooms like an invisible fog. The interior was constructed of fine wood, in contrast to the unmilled trees of the facade. Dark wood with inlays and tight grain and chocolate stain. Oriental rugs in all the rooms and a grandfather clock that was not tick-tocking, its hands poised at six-fifteen. The foyer soared upward into an atrium. A hallway opposite the front door disappeared into the darkness, and a wide staircase climbed up to a second-floor balcony. I stepped into the room to my right and looked around. The furniture was plush and overstuffed; the rugs and walls and ceiling were dark and somber. Iron lions, sitting up on their haunches with their claws bared, guarded a central fireplace. On the wall next to the fireplace hung a painting nearly eight feet tall, depicting a well-dressed man with wild silver hair and a cane. He was looking directly at me, and he held out his hand in such an aggressively welcoming gesture that I was startled.
    “Your great-great-grandfather,” my father said, standing behind me. “Elijah Riddell.”
    “Why’d he put a painting of himself in his own house?” I asked.
    “That’s what rich people do.”
    “Rich people are weird.”
    “Maybe she’s in the kitchen,” my father said, starting off toward the back of the house.
    I wanted to stay and explore the rooms, but I was intimidated by it all. The house began to feel alive, almost, and breathing—a thought disturbing enough to make me follow my father toward the kitchen rather than linger by myself.
    We walked past a dining room with a table nearly twenty-five feet long, surrounded by dozens of chairs, then a dark room with floor-to-ceiling books and stained-glass windows. Eventually we arrived in the kitchen, which I initially judged to be larger than our entire house in Connecticut. To one side of the kitchen was a cooking area with a large butcher block table worn smooth by decades of chopping, a bread oven, and a giant cast-iron stove beneath an expansive copper exhaust hood. Opposite the stove was a long wooden table with a quirky assortment of wooden chairs, an entertainment area of a sort, with a couple of easy chairs and a small sofa and a new TV on an old TV cart. On another wall was a stone walk-in fireplace outfitted with long hooks, which, my father explained, were used for cooking cauldrons of stew in the old days. He pointed out the rotisserie brackets, too, which were used for sides of lamb and slabs of beef.
    “To feed the armies?” I asked, but he ignored my comment.
    “This place was built before electricity,” my father said. “There was no gas supply. The whole area was wilderness when Elijah built his estate. Everything in this house was coal fired; I’ll show you the basement; it’s a pretty fascinating place. At some point someone put in a cutting-edge system where they used calcium carbide and water to produce acetylene to power an electrical generator—”
    “How do you know all this?” I asked.
    “I thought it was cool when I was a kid. I can show you the system. Anyway, they had electricity up here before anyone else did. Long before The North Estate was annexed into the city and they brought up municipal electricity and gas.”
    “Is that where our inheritance went? Developing a cutting-edge electrical system?”
    “You know,” he said, “at some point you’re going to realize that being a smart-ass isn’t as much about being smart as it is about being an ass.”
    “That’s good,” I said. “Did you read that in a fortune cookie?”
    “Probably.”
    I smiled for the first time on our ridiculous journey. Part of it was my father’s joke. Part of it was my father, himself.
    I mean, he looked ridiculous. He looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! He was wearing the same old khakis he always wore and a white T-shirt and boating shoes—and he traveled like that! He’d gotten on an airplane and flown across the country looking like that! When my grandmother and grandfather on my