“What requirements?”
I shook my head. “No clue. Something to keep in mind. After stipulations, there’s a section on stipend, with a regular allowance, notes on how often the lawyers can be called without incurring a debt. Oh, right here. A mention of the bird-skull monsters.”
“What?” I could see Rose move, standing from her seat.
“I’m joking,” I said, with zero humor in my voice. “There’s nothing. A few pages with pictures of the property and the boundaries, some stuff on the adjacent woodland and marsh, a blurb on council meetings, nonsense on contacting the lawyers, and-” I stopped.
“What?”
“A means of opting out. Not joking this time.”
“Somehow I don’t imagine it would be that easy,” Rose said.
“It’s pretty easy. Phone or email the lawyer, and custodianship transfers to the next available candidate.” I reread the legalese and the plain-text to be sure.
“That’s not what I meant,” Rose said. “This whole situation is a trap, right? She’s got some goal in mind, she basically, what, let the world know that she picked Molly as her heir, so all of her enemies come crawling out of the woodwork… and then she does the same for you, even going so far as to set up me for some kind of loophole. She used the situation to force us into this.”
“Right,” I said.
“Does it make more sense that we’re really truly free to walk away, or that there’s a trap waiting for us if we try?”
“A trap,” I said, sighing a little. If I’d let myself hope just a little, that hope was dashed.
“Just off the top of my head, maybe she announced that she picked her heir, but she doesn’t let everyone know that the heir has stepped down. Meaning we’d lose all of the protections and resources we’d have, but we’d still be in just as much trouble.”
“It’s a way to weed out anyone too stupid to consider the ramifications.”
“Or anyone too weak to face the situation,” Rose said. “Knowing her, it fits.”
“You do know her, huh?” I asked. “All this while, you were immersed in this.”
“All this while,” Rose said. “Except I didn’t know this part. Um. Give me a minute. I’m wearing pyjamas, and I feel grungy. I’m going to change, if I can figure out how.”
With that said, she disappeared from the frame.
I remained where I was. Big key, legal pad…
I rifled through Molly’s things. She had kept a duffel bag with her things in it, but it was only clothes and a few cables and a set of headphones for a smartphone.
I felt guilty and more than a little creepy going through her clothes, so I stopped there.
Was I damning myself, with fingerprints and the like? Would the police find her dead and then find that I’d moved myself in, already aware that she was dead?
It was a daunting thought. Another trap? Was grandmother testing me?
It raised another question. Why? Why had she pit us against one another, picking through us for some candidate that could meet some specific, crazy standard? Why was she testing us by putting us through this gauntlet, where we were unprepared and ignorant when these monsters came after us?
“You look pensive,” Rose said.
I looked up. I saw her in the mirror. Wearing a decidedly old fashioned women’s blouse with pearly buttons up the front and a bit of lace on the collar, and a pleated skirt. Her hair was mostly straight, with two lengths from the sides drawn back and pinned with something.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t say a word. There are only so many places with mirrors in the house. What were you thinking about?”
“Traps. Tests. Somehow, I imagine this is about more than looking after a house. You don’t get enemies from property alone. Well, you do, but not really in this era.”
“No, you don’t, but this is a world we don’t fully understand.”
I nodded. “We’re left in the dark. Let’s assume this is a test… you said the lawyers were picking up books?”
“I only glimpsed it, because the light was hitting the windows at the right angles. There were books piled on the table.”
“Describe them?”
“Old books. Like those on the bottom shelf, below me.”
I got up and picked up the book. It had a hard cloth cover, and the spine had been abused by wear and age, cracking and fraying.
“The ones I saw looked like they were in better shape,” Rose said. “I think. It was hard to make out, but he saw me looking, and he approached, and I did get a look at one. There’s a lot of books in the house. We’d be talking about needles in a haystack, here.”
“Why would he clean them up if he was going to put them on the shelves?” I asked. “They deserved his time and attention. Let’s go back to the idea that this is a test. Grandmother’s not holding our hands here. She never did, I don’t think. I mean, mother and father never really got that whole ‘support your kids’ thing either.”
When Rose replied, her voice was quiet. “I have to disagree with you there. They support me. Supported me, past tense, I guess.”
“Okay, fine,” I said, pushing that idea out of my head. “Point is, she’s not coddling us. There are books, they’re important, and the only two options are that the lawyers have them, and the test is as simple as ‘figuring out how to get in contact, or they’re hidden.”
“Hidden?”
I held up the big key. “Took a look around, no idea where it goes. Except I’m not even sure where to begin looking.”
“She’s harsh, cold, but I wouldn’t say she’s unfair,” Rose said. “If she expects us to figure it out, then we have the information we need. Information Molly would have available to her too.”
I looked up at the mirror, but Rose was looking down.
“The documents,” I said, as I realized what she was looking at. “You think Molly got a copy too, along with the key? Or a key?”
“It’s possible,” Rose said.
I picked up the document. This time I flipped through to the image of the property boundaries. Square footage, notes on utilities, restrictions on renovations…
In the midst of the briefs and warnings regarding renovations, I saw a floor plan. Room layout.
I hopped out of my seat, the map in hand. “One second. Can’t take the map and the mirror with my hand like it is.”
“Okay,” she said, but she didn’t look happy.
I got to the third floor and stopped. I held the map up.
Map: Three rooms on the left, one room and the stairwell on the right.
What I saw: Two rooms on the left, one room and the stairwell on the right.
I looked at the floor plan, then made several very deliberate paces down the length of the hall.
I stopped. About twenty-one.
My friends were artists and artistic types. I had the unfortunate distinction of being a less than stellar artist. But I’d owed them for the help and support they’d given me, and in helping them with their jobs, I’d stumbled onto a bit of work. Setting up their work, installations, as well as all the other grunt jobs. Sure, they could go to a carpenter to get something put together in the way of a display stand, but that carpenter wouldn’t necessarily know what was at play with the art.
Along the way, I’d settled into being a go-to handyman and delivery guy in the local art community. I knew the gallery owners, I knew who was who, and if I couldn’t do a job myself, I knew who to call.