Grizzly Manor: Four

A modern take on Wuthering Heights taking place outside of New Orleans.

I was starving, but there was no way I that I was going to go back downstairs to the dining room, where Lance was furiously stirring gumbo and the brunette was taking verbal abuse from an accused murderer.  I’d just cower in my room for a few hours before the rain stopped and I could get the hell out of dodge.

A draft blew in from the tiny, grimy window above my bed.  The magnolia branch kept whipping against it.  The wind and rain outside howled with wrath and the Spanish moss on the tree swung in the wind, reminding me of the ghosts I’d heard all about in the voodoo shops earlier that day.  Shivering, and reminding myself that ghosts weren’t real, despite what the employees in those shops had to say (there was laughter, followed by, “Darlin’, I don’t believe in ghosts.  I know they exist.  The sun’s in the sky, the grass is green, and ghosts are real.”), I thought it was best to distract myself by pulling some of those old, battered, well-loved classic romances off the bookshelf.  It was the one piece of furniture in the room besides the bed and the rocking chair.  There wasn’t even a dresser. 

I was surprised that the yellowed copy of Jane Eyre, with a cracked and faded cover, didn’t fall apart in my hands as I gingerly pulled it off the shelf by it’s spine.  I flipped through the first few pages before pausing, finding a, “This book belongs to,” stamp on one of them.  Apparently, it was property of a woman named Catherine Thibidoux.  She’d signed it several times; one in print, one in cursive, and another was a sloppy, autograph-like signature.  She clearly wasn’t sure of whom Catherine Thibidoux really was yet; let alone how to spell her name.  Teenage girls went through these things, I knew from experience, so I closed the book and tossed it on the bed as a possible read for later.  As it landed, a small puff of dust flew up into the air from its pages �" from its years of no one to read it.

Spotting a copy of Great Expectations, I picked up that battered novel, as well.  Unlike in Jane Eyre, Catherine had written her name only once.  In cramped print, she’d decidedly scribbled down, Catherine Etienne.  It could have been a different Catherine.  The bookshelf could have been made up of a library of books that had been left at the hotel over the years, but the handwriting looked similar.  So…was this woman Catherine Etienne, or Catherine Thibidoux?  Had there been an adoption?  A divorce?  A marriage?

Tossing Great Expectations to the bed to join Jane Eyre (although I probably should have been handling them more carefully, given their fragile state), the pencil sketch against the wall over the bookshelf caught my eye.  In one corner of the sketch (which was clearly of a swamp in Bayou Lafourche), was written in loopy cursive, Catherine Lee.  The “i” was dotted with a heart.  She’d clearly been significantly younger when she’d decided her last name was Lee.

A light bulb went off.

Catherine Lee.  Garrod Lee.  There had to be some sort of relation.  Only, in doing my research, I’d learned that Grizz’s wife’s name had been Delilah.  This Catherine Lee couldn’t be his daughter, either, because Grizz only had one son, Rocco.  Not to mention that the question that was still bothering me was that Grizzly Manor was supposed to be a family-run business.  So then who the hell were Lance and the girl from downstairs?  Maybe the brunette was Catherine Etienne, Thibidoux, or Lee.

Out of the intense heat and because I was starving, it wasn’t hard to fall asleep almost immediately.  I dreamt of tortured Mr. Rochester, in love with someone else while his wife, driven mad, stayed locked up; I dreamt of Miss Havisham, trying so hard to mould Estella into a woman with a heart so cold that no one would ever break it.  It was an uneasy sleep, and when I woke up it was to booms of thunder, cracks of lighting slicing through a purple sky, sheets of water pouring down the windows, and furious winds.  The window blew open with a bang and I jumped, trying to hold it closed against the forces of nature. 

I was pulling it shut with all of my might when a flash caught my eye.  I thought it was just a trick of the light, from the lightening perhaps, but it looked, for a split second, as though a woman was standing in the rain next to one of the mausoleums, staring up into my window.  Before I could try to focus and look any closer, I was distracted by the magnolia branches lashing against the windowpanes.  “God d****t,” I swore, trying to figure out a way to keep the thick glass from shattering.

The wind kept howling through the branches of the magnolia, and whistling in the gaps around my window from insulation that probably hadn’t been updated since before the prohibition, so it took me a while to realize that there was actually someone crying out.  I pressed my ear to the glass, against my better judgment.  “Garrod!” a woman’s voice moaned.  “Garrod!”  It was carrying on the wind, getting louder, but where was it coming from?  “Garrod!”  I was going to check where I’d noticed the woman in white in the graveyard before, but when I drew back from the window, she was right there on the other side.

It didn’t even take one second for me to let out such high-pitched scream that I hadn’t heard it since I was a child.  The woman kept tapping at the window, not seeming to mind that her chocolate brown hair was matted to her head and face.  Her skin was undoubtedly made out of porcelain, and her blue eyes reminded me of the very inside of a glacier.  Even in a white linen gown, rained all over, she was still strikingly beautiful.  In fact, she kind of looked like the girl from the check-in desk.

“Let me in,” she finally appealed to me in a meek voice, knocking gently on the window.  “Please.”

I opened and closed my mouth several times, but both it and my throat had been stuffed with cotton.  Instead, I just shook my head. 

“Please,” she begged again.  When I shook my head for the second time, she got more upset and started banging against the window.  “Please!” she shouted desperately.  “Please let me in!”  With a few more bangs of her fist, she broke the window free of its lock and again it blew open with a bang.  Letting out another scream, I jumped as far away from her as I could.  The woman reached her hand through the window.  “Please!  Let me in!”

“Get out!” I shrieked, and, buried underneath my sheer terror was also a hint of frustration.  The Manor wasn’t that big.  Someone had to hear me.  “Get out!”

“Please, I need to come in,” she tried to insist.  The rain hailed diagonally into the window, soaking my pillows.

“Get out!” I screamed again, reaching towards her to push her out the window. 

“No, please!” she urged, sobbing now.  

With a furious roar and as much strength and courage as I could muster, I pushed the woman as hard as I could out of the window, and off the branch of the tree where she was perched.  Wincing, I waited for the sickening crunch of a body hitting the ground, but the sound never came. 

Instead, the door to my room burst open.  With no explanation, Grizz Lee barreled into my room and, throwing the top half of his body out the window with such force that I was afraid that he, too, would go tumbling out, he started screaming.  “CAT!”  He sounded like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.  Any moment now he was going to get down on his knees and tear his shirt off.  “CAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!”  His voice carried in the howling wind, and it sounded like someone was shredding apart his vocal chords.  Finally, when Cat didn’t answer, he mumbled out in a voice that can’t be described as anything but pathetic, “Cat…”

Cat.  Short for Catherine.  Etienne?  Thibidoux?  Lee?

Grizz had nearly shouted himself hoarse hollering into the storm, when he turned to me.  I backed against the wall, terrified.  In a low, gravely voice he demanded, “What did you do?

“What?” I cried out.  “What are you talking about?  I was sleeping!” 

The rain was still soaking my pillows.  Grizz looked at them, not seeming to notice or care that I was growing exceedingly hysterical.  Slowly, he closed the window, but not before peering out of it again; one last forlorn search for Cat Whoever.  When he looked back up at me, there was no denying the dead expression in his eyes.  There was no anger, no sadness; just…nothing.  Finally, he cleared his throat.  “I’ll get Rose to bring you some new pillows.”

I assumed that Rose was the brunette at the counter, but I couldn’t care less.  I didn’t care about Rose, or Catherine Whoever the F**k She Was, or poor, abused Lance.  What the f**k had just happened?  Before I could demand to know, Grizz had left the room, presumably to go bark orders at Rose to get me dry pillows.

By the time Rose came back into the room, I had made sure the window was securely closed about eight times, and I still wasn’t 100% sure.  Not that it mattered.  I could have boarded that thing up with 4x4s or plates of steel and there would still be no way I’d get to sleep tonight.

Rose had clearly been in a deep, undisturbed slumber throughout all the commotion.  She was in a pair of sweatpants and an oversized LSU t-shirt, holding two pillows to her body and letting out a yawn.  She reminded me of my boys when they were little and came into my room, awoken from their nightmares.  I wondered how old she really was.  Too young for whatever was going on here; too young to be living with and working for a murderer.  “You need pillows?” she asked through her yawn.

“Yeah,” I nodded, handing her the soggy ones.

She blinked as we traded, seeming to just notice the mess at the head of my bed.  “What happened?”

“The window,” I gestured behind me to it.  “It opened in the wind and rain, I guess.”

Rose looked at me for a minute, trying to figure out what I was keeping from her.  I didn’t know how she knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth, but she did.  Craning her neck, she peered out the window but, like Grizz, found nothing.  “Oh.  Well that’s a shame.  Good thing you’re leaving tomorrow then, innit?”  She was daring me.  One eyebrow raised, she was just daring me to risk it �" to spend one more night at Grizzly Manor. 

No dice.  “Good thing,” I nodded.  “Thank you for the pillows, Rose.”

If she was disappointed, it didn’t show on her face.  She left the room and I locked the door behind her.  I didn’t get even a wink of sleep that night.

Author's Note

This is a modern re-telling of Wuthering Heights that takes place in various places around Louisiana. It was hard to work out because Wuthering Heights actually has a really odd narrative structure. Any and all comments are appreciated, and if you have questions or anything is unclear please don't be afraid to say so.