“I tried. I’m not sure it mattered. I wish I could help more.”
“Do me a favor, then. Keep an eye on me. If I get a fever, or if I start to look ill, let me know. Make me go to a hospital.”
“It didn’t hit me until I saw you back there,” Rose said. “How different we are. I wasn’t even in any direct danger, and I couldn’t think of what to do.”
“If I learned to deal with bad situations, you will too.”
She didn’t respond right away. I opened the packages.
“You know how to do sutures?” She asked.
“I’ve done it once.”
“When did you need stitches?”
I didn’t feel like answering that one. “They weren’t for me. It was for a friend. This’ll be the first time stitching myself up.”
My good hand shook so much I couldn’t get the thread through the hole. I swore under my breath on the fifth failure.
“Blake-”
“Shh. One second,” I said, and my frustration made my response more curt than I’d intended.
I ended up having to rest the sides of both hands against the edge of the sink to have something concrete to rest against, minimizing how much the thread and needle shook.
Once I had it threaded, I took my time disinfecting the area and the needle both. I was rough with myself, all things considered, searching the wound for any fragments. I didn’t want any trace of those things in or on my body. When my hand throbbed and involuntarily jumped at the pain, I grimly assured myself I was at least getting the infection out.
I had told Rose ‘one second’, but she remained silent while I worked, and I didn’t break the silence, except to swear. I used pretty much every curse word I knew, almost every step of the way. It helped.
I raised my hand. “How’s that look?”
“Better than I could ever do.”
“That doesn’t answer the question,” I said.
“Ha ha,” she said, humorless. “It looks good.”
“Good,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I slowly patrolled the house. The ground floor consisted of an expansive living room, a generous dining room, a smaller kitchen with only the basics, the hallway and a half-bathroom the size of my regular bathroom.
One floor up, I found my grandmother’s bedroom, the same as I’d seen it, though the bed was stripped bare, a small bathroom, a little tea room that might have been a bedroom at one point, and a narrow guest bedroom. Molly had barely touched anything on the second floor, by the looks of it. She’d used this bathroom, with a handful of items littering the counter, but that would be because it was the only bath and shower.
She’d been cooped up in this house, and she’d barely touched anything? The living room, kitchen and this bathroom suggested she’d spent some time here, but how had she managed without losing it? It had been four months.
The third floor had only three smallish rooms, though ‘small’ was something of a misnomer, with a house of this scale. Two bedrooms on the right side, with little more than beds and a dresser each, and a small sewing room that was apparently assigned to storage.
A staircase took up the rest of the space, curving up and around to the fourth floor, but the door was locked.
I fished in my pocket, found the old key, and weighed it in my hand. I hadn’t found a single locked door in the house. The key was of the old ‘skeleton key’ variety, a round bar as thick around as any of my fingers, with an ornate head and a tab on the end with the teeth.
I knew just by looking at it that it didn’t fit the keyhole. I tried anyways.
No such luck. I hadn’t seen anything that needed opening, which raised one big question. Why was it important for me to get the key, without any lock to go with it?
I made my way back to the ground floor, stopping by the bathroom to lift the mirror free of the wall, then carried it back to the living room, for Rose.
I fiddled until I found I could use the mounts to hang it off the bookcase. It was just tall enough that it fell between eye level when I was standing and eye level when I sat. I pulled a cushion from the armchair and placed it beneath, in case it fell.
When I’d finished, I did another look around the ground floor, peering out the windows to see if there was any sign of trouble. The town was starting to come to life, with cars and a few kids with backpacks on the road, heading to school.
Though a sidewalk ran alongside the outer wall below the house, it seemed to be habit for people to walk on the other side of the street.
No bird masks, no crooked men. I moved back to the living room to look out a different window for a different angle.
“Well?” Rose asked.
“It’s too ordinary,” I replied. I rubbed at my face. “God damn, I’m tired.”
“Ordinary?”
“It’s a house. A boring, ordinary house that my grandmother lived in for her entire life.”
“Our grandmother,” she replied.
“It’s soulless, sorta. Our dad and aunt Irene and Uncle Paul were raised here, but there are no toys or mementos left around for the memories. Even my mother and father left some of my stuff around.”
“I really don’t want to be pedantic,” Rose said, “But they’re our mother and father.”
“Are they?” I asked. I leaned back, propping one foot up on the corner of the coffee table, looking over at the mirror. “Because I think the dad you got was very different from the dad I got.”
“Same person, different circumstance,” Rose said, her voice firm.
“Sure. Fine, let’s go with that,” I said. I dropped my foot and abruptly leaned forward, grabbing the envelope with the pad of paper. I took a look.
“What is it?” Rose asked. “I don’t have a copy, here.”
“Legal documents. Let’s see… forty-one pages. The transfer of Rosalyn D. Thorburn’s estate from custodian Molly Walker, grandchild, to custodian Blake Thorburn, grandchild. The first page outlines the terms of the contract. The property is mine in a general sense only. The lawyer manages it until I’m twenty-five, at which point the custodian label is removed and the heir is appointed.”
“Rosalyn D. Thorburn senior,” Rose said. “I remember him saying something like that at the gathering.”
“I do too. The second page… is going out of its way to outline that the notes accompanying the text ‘aren’t binding nor are they intended to be read as such’… looks like the rest is about a fifty fifty split between legalese and explanations for the legalese, for us plebs.”
“No answers? About the monsters?”
“Not on the surface,” I said. I paged through the papers, noting the headings “Times of effect, terms, stipulations…”
“Stipulations?”
I went back a page.
“Taking care of the house, paying upkeep from the account accorded to the custodian of the property to ensure the driveway, lawn and gardens are looked after, attending meetings with the firm, ummm,” I paused to look over the next bit. “Right at the end, a note saying possession of the property can be revoked if the custodian doesn’t meet the requirements noted by the client, Mrs. Thorburn.”