The “Holiday House” of Miss Rebekah Barnes had a story of its own; something Carol was unaware of until the day she moved in the place.
She walked through the porch with half-dried roses and rolled her suitcase in through the grand brown door to the living room with a lonely loveseat lying about in the empty space. People said that Rebekah moved to Rhode Island from New York after her divorce and this was her second husband’s dream house, someone who passed away from a heart disease soon after their charming little wedding. Getting little to no time to spend it here with her beautiful wife.
Carol studied the empty furniture and moved to the hallway, passing the bathroom with old champagne bottles lying around with cigarette packs on the floor. After the divorce, people said, Rebekah lost her wits and turned to everything that existed for pleasure and nothing more. She went to parties with new friends every night and did things no lady could do without gossip brewing about.
Chalking it down to throw the mess out later, Carol moved forward to the bedroom, finding the dressing table with a broken mirror and a stray shirt laying on the haphazard bed. Lovers, mused the people, she had many. Not a day went by when some man no one has ever seen before came back home with her and disappeared before the morning sun came out.
A den of iniquity is what the holiday house was called now, years in the passing. Everyone walked around it but never stepped a foot inside. Murmuring within cliques about how Rebekah was the most shameless woman this town has ever seen. Wondering what would have been like if she never showed up and had a marvelous time ruining everything.
Standing here at the precipice of a new life, Carol wonders if this is what Rebekah felt like when starting a new life with her second husband after leaving the wretched one from before. Everyone in the town had their own stories of what happened to the poor woman who built this holiday house with the remains of all the scattered dreams from the past. But isn’t it awful, in a way, that no one would ever know the truth as the protagonist of the story has long buried herself within the sea off the island.
She was the victim of something horrible, they said, and still continued to bad-mouth her even after all the years gone by.
Carol would have to burn the loveseat, throw the champagne bottles and throw away the man’s shirt in Rebeakah’s wake and let her go in peace after the torment of life.
She would have to truly define the end of the last great American dynasty.
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