Preview of The Audrey Hepburn Estate by Brenda Janowitz

Preview of The Audrey Hepburn Estate by Brenda Janowitz

Chapter 1

Now

They say lots of things about going home. Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like home.

You can never go home again.

But Emma Jansen was, in fact, going home again. Well, not home, exactly, because the place she grew up wasn’t really hers, never really belonged to her.

Still, she had lived there. She had lived there and loved there and had a life there. And that meant something to her.

The train slid into the station at Glen Cove three minutes late. Every time she walked off the train at the Glen Cove station, she imagined herself Audrey Hepburn, in that scene from Sabrina. She would simply walk to the curb and the dashing David Larrabee would drive up, as if on cue, in his Nash Healey Spider.

Was that why she hadn’t taken one of the catering vans out to Long Island? An attempt to live out the plot of one of her favorite childhood movies? She’d watched and rewatched Sabrina so many times with her father as a kid that she had practically every line, every scene memorized. Sabrina may have been a chef, like Emma was now, but Sabrina Fairchild certainly did not drive around in a catering van like Emma Jansen usually did.

Emma walked to the cab stand. No David Larrabee in sight. She adjusted her tote bag on her shoulder as she got in line for a taxi. Moments later, she was in the back of a cab, windows down.

“First time in Glen Cove?” the driver asked when she told him the address.

“No, I grew up here,” she said, forcing a smile as she looked out the open window.

In the city, thirty-two-year-old Emma usually took the subway. She hated when cab drivers tried to make conversation. She never knew what to say. She chastised herself for not ordering a rideshare. At least with the press of a button she could request a quiet ride.

It wasn’t that Emma was unkind. She simply wasn’t good at small talk. Emma usually jumped right to the big talk. 

“In that case, welcome home,” the cab driver said, his smile as wide as the length of Long Island.

Emma didn’t know how to respond.

The longer they drove through Glen Cove, the larger the houses became. When they drove up to the address Emma had given him, it looked like an abandoned parcel, not the formerly grand estate it once was: La Paisible. A huge construction gate circled the property, with a small opening off the main road.

“This it?” the cab driver asked. A tiny sign on the gate read, Sales Center, with an arrow directing cars to drive through.

“Yes,” Emma said, staring out the window up the long, sweeping driveway. Even in its disarray, she’d know this place anywhere. “That’s it.”

As they pulled up the drive, Emma felt as if she were in a dream. The sort of dream where you know exactly where you are, but everything is different somehow. The property seemed smaller than she’d remembered. Was that because now, as an adult, she was bigger herself? Or had her mind made things grander in her memory, made every pathway wider, made every structure more imposing?

The estate was in shambles. The grass was brown, dried-up, all over. The bricks on the main driveway were falling apart, breaking away at the edges in some spots, completely missing in others. Gone were the beautiful rows of boxwood shrubs, lined up neatly with nary a leaf out of place, that Linwood would tend to with care. He would spend hours each day meticulously cutting back the greenery, making sure the garden looked polished, manicured. But now there were no flowers in sight, no hydrangea bushes or peonies. Things that made the estate look alive, happy. Lived-in.

It looked abandoned. Which is what it was, really. When the family left, it had been bought by a real estate developer who’d planned to flip the house and the property. But then the recession hit, and there were no buyers for the house and its surrounding eight acres. It soon went into foreclosure and sat empty for years. As the estate deteriorated, it became harder and harder to sell, because even though the property had value, it was a fixer-upper. The amount of money it would take to get the estate back to its former glory seemed infinite. No other developer would touch it.

Until now.

The cab drove past the main house. Emma squinted—surely that wasn’t it. The house she knew was stately, and stood proudly among the tall pine trees. One of the pines had fallen over and had taken permanent residence in the left wing of the house, in what used to be the formal living room. The rest of the house hadn’t fared much better: the Juliet balconies on the front windows were in various stages of disrepair, and there were broken windows throughout the first floor. The grand lighting fixture that used to hang under the porte cochere was missing, and Emma noticed some faint spray paint marks across the front door.

The house wasn’t her house anymore. It had been damaged and vandalized. It wasn’t cared for, loved, like in its heyday. Emma felt it in the pit of her belly. Coming back had been a mistake.

“Up here?” the cab driver asked, stopping at a clearing with a lonely construction trailer standing in the middle. A few luxury cars—one Mercedes and two BMWs—were parked in front. There was a small sign next to the door marked Sales Center.

“Thank you,” Emma said, and paid the driver.

She stepped out of the cab and took a deep breath. Whenever she’d come home, the smell of the pine trees would always calm Emma down. She’d forgotten that, the way the pine trees greeted you. The smell of the place was such a huge part of her memory. Walking into the kitchen, the warm perfume of roasted garlic, fresh rosemary, and bread baking in the oven. Every spring, the faint smell of the lilacs, which would tell her that summer was coming. When the lilacs bloomed, they’d sleep with the windows open, the lovely scent seeping into her dreams, making them sweet. Even the back shed, which housed the bikes, had a particular aroma. Dirt and sweat and nectar. It smelled like an adventure to come.

But Emma didn’t smell anything wonderful like that as she walked toward the Sales Center. It smelled like construction, which she supposed made sense, since the estate was now a construction site, but the notes of wood being torn down, dust lingering in the air, and gasoline from the massive construction vehicles didn’t soothe her the way the pines used to. It only brought on an allergy attack.

“Are you here for the tour?” a kind voice asked. A woman opened the door to the trailer as Emma approached, sneezing.

Emma tried to say yes as she crossed the threshold, but another sneeze escaped. “Excuse me,” Emma said.

“Looks like you could use one of these,” the woman said, offering Emma a napkin and a bottle of water. The water had a printed label, dark gray with the word Hepburn in white block letters.

“Thank you,” Emma said. She took a sip of water and then turned the water bottle over in her hands, examining the label.

“The presentation’s about to begin,” the woman said with a wide smile as she walked into the Sales Center. Emma followed her lead.

The inside of the trailer didn’t match the outside. From the outside, it looked worn down, beaten up. But inside was another story entirely. Decked out in rich carpeting overlaid with thick rugs, and tasteful wallpaper and crown molding, it didn’t feel like you were inside a trailer. It was bigger, too. Emma would later find out that it was actually two construction trailers combined to create the elegant Sales Center she was standing in.

Emma followed the woman to the center of the trailer, where they had a graceful living room set up. A chocolate-brown leather couch, distressed in all the right places so as to denote “lived-in.” Two oversized rattan armchairs, with cushions in the same fabric as the pillows on the couch. A large tufted ottoman, made of a rich brown velvet, with an enormous rattan tray placed just so. A dark red rug was laid down on the floor to delineate the space. And it worked. Emma truly felt as if she were in someone’s warm living room, and not in a construction trailer. The attention to detail was impressive—small vases filled with flowers were scattered about, a coffee and tea station had been set up toward the back, and the tiny windows all had big window treatments, giving the illusion that they were larger.

The couches and chairs were already filled with people, so Emma stood behind the oversized leather couch.

A man walked out from the back of the trailer. When he saw her, he smiled. “Well, I’ll be.”

Emma directed her eyes down toward the plush rug, suddenly embarrassed. She wished she’d checked her appearance before walking in. She was probably disheveled from the train ride, from the allergy attack. And here he stood, looking expensive in his custom-made sport coat and designer jeans. His look now was so different from the way she remembered him as a child—messy, always with filthy knees from playing in the dirt. It was different from the last time she’d seen him, a mere seven years ago.

She wondered what he thought when he looked at her.

“I’d like to welcome you all to Hepburn,” he said, throwing his arms out wide. It wasn’t only his appearance that was more polished, Emma thought. It was his whole manner. It was soft, silky smooth. “What we’re building here is a new community, one we hope you’ll want to be a part of.”

The woman who’d greeted Emma at the door now passed around glossy brochures.

“Hepburn is so called because you are standing on a piece of history. And I don’t say that just because it’s where I grew up.” He paused for laughter. Most of the people laughed. Everyone, in fact, except for Emma. She narrowed her eyes, examined every square inch of his face. “This estate, throughout my childhood, was lovingly known as the Audrey Hepburn Estate.”

“They filmed Sabrina here, didn’t they?” a woman seated on the brown leather couch asked. “I knew it looked familiar!”

“Good eye,” he said, flashing a warm smile. Emma looked down at his hands: no wedding ring. “This estate was the inspiration for the Billy Wilder picture, Sabrina. Originally built in 1899, neighbors took to calling it the Audrey Hepburn Estate soon after the release of the film.”

Wrong, Emma thought. That was wrong, and he knew it. She didn’t know what to tackle first—the snooty way he was calling a movie a picture as if he were a Hollywood executive, circa 1950, or the fact that he was perpetrating a lie. But that lie, she supposed, was the reason all this was happening. He was tearing down the estate and creating an entire new world in its place. A world filled with very small, very expensive condos. A luxury apartment building and a bunch of townhouses. He justified the price with this story that the estate was the inspiration for the Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina. He was leaning into it—the brochure had photographs of the indoor tennis court, and the caption referenced the scene in the movie where Audrey Hepburn waits for William Holden, only to be surprised by the appearance of Humphrey Bogart instead. Hell, he was calling the place Hepburn.

Truth was, they called it the Audrey Hepburn Estate because it shared an address with the Larrabee estate in the movie. Dosoris Lane. Sometimes the owners said that the estate was supposed to have been used in the film, but ultimately wasn’t because of studio red tape, and sometimes they said that the property had merely been the inspiration for the Larrabee estate in the film.

Even though they filmed parts of the movie in Glen Cove (hello, Glen Cove train station!), the place where Emma grew up was not one of them. Hill Grove, the home of George Lewis in Beverly Hills, was used for filming.

But none of this really mattered, because now he was tearing it all down.

Emma had needed to see it one more time.

“Will we get a tour of the main house?” Emma asked, casually flipping through the brochure. The pictures of the main house weren’t real—it took a minute to figure out, but they were computer-generated images from old photographs. Emma marveled at how true to life they looked. She looked away for a moment, trying to picture the real house in her mind’s eye.

“We hadn’t planned to do that,” he replied with a wide smile. “It’s fallen into disrepair, and we wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Or is it,” Emma challenged, “because you wouldn’t want anyone to know that it’s haunted?”

The guests on the couch all gasped, but he didn’t even flinch. He laughed a deep, throaty laugh, very unlike the many belly laughs they’d shared as kids. This was a grown-up man’s laugh, not a child’s. This was a rich person’s laugh. This was a patronizing laugh. “The house is not haunted. Simply another bit of old folklore about the estate. We can’t go in because, among other things, an enormous pine tree is in the middle of the living room. And a family of squirrels have made themselves quite at home inside.”

“So this has nothing to do with the summer the chef died?” Emma said. “Who haunts the house to this day?”

A woman sitting on the couch squealed with delight. “Is that true?” she asked, her eyes searching.

“It’s not true,” he said, rubbing his eye carefully with his pointer finger. He rearranged his face into a broad smile. “Of course that’s not true.”

“The house is haunted,” Emma said, staring him down. “You know it, and I know it.”

“Oh, did you grow up here, too?” the woman on the couch asked. She had swiveled her body around and now had all of her focus on Emma. “Are you a van der Wraak?”

“No,” Emma said, adjusting her shoulders so that she stood up straight. “My mother was the maid.”

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