Grizzly Manor: Three

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

I spent the next day back in New Orleans, steering clear of St. Louis Cemetery and spending most of my time wondering how no one seemed to be drenched in sweat…except for me.  In the daylight, New Orleans was a significantly less creepy place.  Rather, during the daytime I could appreciate the Big Easy for the vibrant city it is.  I allowed myself one day of acting the complete tourist.  I took the trolley, went to Café du Monde, listened to street musicians, tasted more delicious food (gumbo, jambalaya, etouffee) than I knew existed, and stopped in more than one store completely devoted to the art of voodoo.

After a day of sweating through the streets of New Orleans, I figured it was best to head back to Grizzly Manor before I passed out into a food coma on the drive.  It wasn’t until I stopped for gas on my way out of town that I realized why the owner of the B&B was familiar to me.  After filling my tank, I headed inside to the convenience store for a pack of gum and my eleventh bottle of water that day, because I’d quickly learned that no amount of air-conditioning was going to prevent dehydration.  Tossing my Orbit and Aquafina on the counter, my eyes scanned the magazine and newspaper racks next to the register, and landed on the Times-Picayune.  Right on the front page was a picture of my host, Garrod “Grizz” Lee.

He was wearing a well-tailored Tom Ford tux, a necklace in the shape of a bear that had more diamonds than Queen Elizabeth had probably ever seen in her life, and a snapback like the ones my kids had taken to wearing everywhere lately.  He had apparently attended a charity event with some other New Orleans famous faces �" Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Cage, Drew Brees, Sandra Bullock, Lil Wayne (another rapper my boys loved listening to at deafening levels).  Yesterday I had encountered him in dark wash blue jeans and a white t-shirt, but even in the different clothes, he was unmistakable.  It was the eyes, the green eyes that reminded me of a chilly, winter morning. 

After a phone call with my fourteen-year-old (during which he spent a lot of time telling me how embarrassed he was that his own mother hadn’t recognized Grizz Lee at first sight), I was fully educated in Grizz Lee.  He was a rapper turned actor turned entrepreneur.  He had multi-platinum albums, an Oscar, business ventures including at least one casino and a golf course, a clothing line, and his own brand of scotch, and those were just the ones I knew about.  I expected that my sons would know more than I did, and would be aware of his involvement in Grizzly Manor, but when I mentioned it to them, they had no idea.  It took a few minutes on the internet, but eventually we collectively gathered that Grizz was actually from New Orleans, and that apparently the Manor was a family-run enterprise. 

Even with this explanation I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he still held onto the place.  Grizz was an enterprising mogul.  Everything he touched seemed to turn to gold.  He was a self-made millionaire (probably billionaire); why would he need to run a bed and breakfast in the Middle of Nowhere, Louisiana?  It wasn’t like Bayou Lafourche was a popular vacation destination.  Even people who wanted to stay outside of New Orleans when they visited took their business elsewhere.  It seemed that I was the only guest, as they old couple from last night had checked out that morning.  Grizz certainly didn’t need the Manor to add to his disposable income.  In fact, the place was probably hemorrhaging money.  None of this made any sense.

I made a mental note to try and find out a little more about the man in case of another run-in, and to satisfy my own curiosity, at the very least.  It didn’t seem likely that we’d cross paths again.  Grizz had probably just stopped in last night on the way to a sold-out concert at the Superdome, or en route to a business meeting in Dubai.  Lightning didn’t strike twice.  Besides, I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to run into him again and own up to my humiliating faux pas.  I was, however, completely confused as to how he benefitted in any way from running the Manor.  My sons couldn’t seem to find an answer on the internet, and up until then I had been pretty convinced that if you left the three of them alone in a room with a MacBook, they would either solve world hunger or start a nuclear holocaust.  So when I got back to the B&B that night I had every intention of spending a significant amount of the evening Googling Garrod Lee.

There are a lot of times when my husband and I, or my sons, have been watching a horror movie, and there is always the collective agreement that the protagonist should not open a door, or step into a room, or reach out a hand.  The audience somehow knows, through camera angles and lighting and music, that something unpleasant is about to happen.  Inevitably, the protagonist opens the door, steps into the room, reaches out the hand, and that unpleasant thing does happen.  It wasn’t until my second night at the Manor that I had a better understanding of those characters.  I wasn’t sure why, and I’m certain that I’ll never be able to accurately describe the feeling in words, but I somehow felt wrong entering the lobby that evening.  It was like having a slight fever, or not being able to sleep from being just somewhat overheated.  Simply put, I felt uncomfortable.    

And still, like that main character in the movie whom we so desperately want to live to see the end credits, I entered Grizzly Manor anyway.

I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t heard it from outside.  There was some commotion in the kitchen that I was sure the whole Bayou could pick up on.  “I don’t pay you to sit back here on your a*s, Lance!”  It was the unmistakable roar of a grown man and I knew it was Grizz.  All I heard by way of a response was an unintelligible mumble from Lance.  “I don’t give a s**t if we got one customer or one thousand!  If you don’t got nothing to do then I’ll just stop paying you!  I don’t even know why I keep you useless piece of white trash around here anyway!”

While this reprimand felt a little excessive, I was sure I’d elicited the same reaction when I’d worked at a seafood shack on the Cape one summer.  Call them crazy, but business owners seemed not to like seeing their employees having too much free time.  Trying to give Grizz the benefit of the doubt (if he was really that bad of a boss he definitely would have been slammed with a lawsuit by now, right?) I headed up to the room I was staying in, apparently the White Room, to get started on my research.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time researching things that I want to write about and have absolutely no knowledge of.  Having been a writer for quite some time now, I feel as though I’ve gotten pretty good at it and, like I said, with the help of my sons I can usually figure out anything with a few clicks of a keypad.  Any information on Grizz Lee was the exception to this rule.  A Google search for “Grizz Lee” offered up his complete discography, the website for his clothing line, a few more red carpet shots.  “Garrod Lee” wasn’t much better, and there was certainly no answer as to why he kept Grizzly Manor so poorly maintained.  It obviously wasn’t how he kept his other hotels.  It didn’t seem like a very good business plan.

While there seemed to be an absence of information (the kind of information I was looking for, anyway), there were three Google hits that not only caught my eye, but terrified me as well.  I suddenly knew why I’d gotten that feeling before I entered the Manor just moments ago.  Grizz’s wife, Delilah, had jumped from the twelfth story of one of Grizz’s Vegas hotels, shortly after giving birth to their son, Rocco.  There was very little information on the death, but most of the articles that were out there seemed to imply that Delilah may have jumped…or she may not have.  Rocco, too, had died prematurely of a cocaine overdose in a hotel in Japan.  Both of these tragedies could, of course, just have been Grizz’s bad luck.  The third story I found had nothing to do with luck, or chance, or coincidence, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The third story I found chilled me to the bone. 

On February 2^nd of 2016, Grizz Lee had been arrested on site, after beating a man to death, right here in Grizzly Manor.  He’d gotten off on a self-defense plea, and the murder certainly hadn’t seemed to diminish his popularity at all.  Still, the fact remained that I was staying in a house with a cold-blooded murderer.

Well, I needed to change that immediately.

I had frantically packed my bag and decided that I would make the sacrifice to stay closer to the creepy St. Louis Cemetery if it meant getting out of Grizzly Manor.  My choices were clear: spend the night tossing and turning where an actual murder had taken place, or spend the night tossing and turning within a reasonable distance of an eerie graveyard.  I was going to choose the latter. 

I was about to make my hasty departure from the White Room and the Manor, but right before I left the room, something out of the tiny window above the bed caught my eye.  I hadn’t noticed it in the dark last night, nor in my dreary pre-coffee daze this morning, but outside of the Manor, tucked back a ways in the woods surrounding the property, was a small graveyard.  I could very clearly make out several mausoleums and above ground cement coffins. 

Yes, my situation had to change immediately.

As fast as I possibly could, I jogged down the stairs, hoping not to run into the pretty brunette, or Lance, or, most of all, Grizz.  Of course, all three of them were in the lobby.  This time, however, instead of being loudly reprimanded by Grizz, Lance and the brunette were standing in silence.  She was giving Grizz another one of her fearless, frustrated expressions, and I got the awkward feeling that I’d just walked in on a conversation I shouldn’t be hearing.

“You better watch your mouth,” Grizz warned her through clenched teeth.  Then, seemingly without any sort of provocation, he added, “You’re a cheap ho just like your mother.”

“Don’t talk to her like that,” Lance spoke up, not at all the shy, quiet, good ol’ boy I’d met last night.

“I don’t need your help, Lance,” the girl snapped.

Lance gave her a withering look, the receiving end of which I never would have wanted to be on.  “Fine, then you’re on your own,” he appeased her before leaving the lobby.  A few seconds later I heard pots and pans banging around in the kitchen, apparently as a vessel for Lance to get out his anger.

The brunette had moved on from Lance’s reaction to her insistence that she didn’t need him to intervene, back to Grizz.  “I wouldn’t know anything about my mother, since I can’t remember her.”

Grizz’s nostrils flared, and I wasn’t sure why this statement seemed to upset him more than her.  “You never met her because she was f*****g crazy.”

There was no right time to make my presence known, and I was terrified to do the inevitable.  Mustering up the courage, I interjected.  “I’m checking out.”

Grizz looked over to where I was standing at the bottom of the stairs.  He didn’t seem to care that I’d just witnessed very extreme verbal abuse, and that I would most certainly be called as a witness when this girl inevitably sued him.  “You’re reserved for the whole week,” he snarled.

“Look, I don’t need a refund, I’m just going to stay in the city.”

Grizz looked out the window and then back at me.  “Good luck getting anywhere in this.”  Another little known fact about Louisiana: in the summer, it rains every day.  The thick water in the air, combined with the severe heat, creates so much pressure that the earth eventually just cracks and opens up, unleashing its fury in the form of a torrential downpour.  “Streets are flooded.” 

“There has to be a way out,” I insisted.  It wasn’t like people in Bayou Lafourche never went anywhere when it rained.

“Well there ain’t,” Grizz shrugged.  “You just gon’ have to wait.”

When he turned and walked away, disappearing outside and slamming the door behind him, I turned to the girl, hoping to appeal to her so she might help me find a way out.  “There has to be a way to get to the city.”

The girl gave me the same shrug Grizz had.  “Not really.  You gon’ have to wait ‘til tomorrow.  You stuck here for now.”

Letting out a weary, disappointed sigh, I accepted my defeat and climbed back up the stairs to the White Room.  Behind me, the girl added under her breath, “At least for you it’s just for tonight.”

Her statement would have confused me more, but I was maxed out on that state of being.  I shivered, chilled through to the core of my bones, trying to face the fact that I’d have to spend another night at Grizzly Manor.  At least it would be my last.  It was just one night, after all.  What could possibly go wrong? 

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.