The Red Tower — Lucile Vernon Stevens

The huge blood-red brick mansion, its tall corner tower glittering with windows like some all-seeing eye, looked sinister to Leone. For the first time she wondered what kind of welcome she would receive there... and what kind of man she had married in Nigel Ashbrook. They had met in South America while she was on vacation and he was on business. Now they had come home to Ashbrook House where Nigel lived with his widowed uncle and his half-sister, Doris, and whatever relatives decided to take up temporary residence. At the moment, these included cousin Hugh Cantrell and his wife; cousin Noreen and her husband and son; and Bonnie, Noreen's sister, and her step-daughter, Cassie. All of them, Leone discovered, were haunted by the "ghost" of Nigel's Aunt Vivian, who had fallen -- or been pushed -- out of the tower. Then Doris is almost killed in a similar accident, and this time suspicion falls on Nigel... a suspicion even Leone, who loves him, can't help sharing...

After a glamorous honeymoon in the Caribbean, Nigel Ashbrook returned to his ancestral home in Riverglade with his young bride, Leone, whom he had met in South America. The town of Riverglade owed its existence to the sprawling Ashbrook Works, a factory started by Nigel's great-grandfather, and turned into an ill-smelling, all-embracing behemoth by Nigel's grandfather, the tyrannical Jefferson T., feared alike by his children and his factory workers. Of Jefferson T.'s five children, Margaret was left no part of the works; neither was Harley, the artist, who went off to Paris and carved out a career for himself; the works were left to the 'Judge,' a nickname earned in childhood, to William, the chemist, and to Vivian. Leone was to learn that Aunt Vivian had been killed by a fall from the tower room four years earlier, and that William, Nigel's father, had died when Nigel was eight, also leaving a daughter, Nigel's half-sister Doris, aged three. She was dismayed to learn that the three-story, red-brick home, with its elaborate grillwork--the 'bastion,' she privately called it--was to be Nigel's when the judge died. Besides Doris and the 'Judge,' greeting the new bride were the visiting Ashbrook cousins, there on various pretexts: Hugh Cantrell, Aunt Margaret's son, and his fat wife, Effie; Noreen, Uncle Harley's daughter, her husband, Dean Shanley, and small Charles, always into mischief, and always whining for attention; Bonnie, Noreen's sister, there between divorces, with her stepdaughter, Cassie, carrot-topped, pointed-faced and inquisitive. Doris was the most beautiful person that Leone had ever seen, but she was to find that the golden-haired Doris' disposition did not match her beauty. To the young bride, there was something sinister about the house and most of its occupants. When Doris fell from the tower window and became an invalid, Nigel, upon whom the blame fell, left Riverglade without explanation to his wife. Leone would have left too, but the judge, of whom she had grown fond, needed her, and Doris needed her even more. Thus Mrs. Stevens sets the stage for her intricate Gothic story of greed in a family--most of it caused by Jefferson T.'s lopsided will. It would be four years before the final act was played out in that upper tower room and the old Ashbrook house would at last know peace.