All of this was helping me to get a sense of why Molly had been so driven to empty shelves and remove pictures from the walls. My grandmother had a presence here, and it was a presence that felt like it could override my own.
Especially when my own presence seemed somewhat limited. When I looked in the mirror, I saw only the bathroom, and I saw Rose, her back turned.
No reflection, using different soaps and shampoo that made me smell different, no longer having the little trinkets and touches I’d surrounded myself with over the past year or two, it all made me feel less like me.
Each of those things had a flip side, seeing a reminder of our grandmother’s work in the mirror, smelling our grandmother’s lavender-scented shampoo and soap, seeing her trinkets and small touches wherever I looked, I felt like she hadn’t quite left. Her presence was still here.
Which it was, kind of. We had stumbled onto one lingering threat. The books my grandmother had written, left untouched, still waited in that study.
How deep did that particular danger run?
“Hey,” I said. “Did you ever share scary stories with Molly and Paige?”
“A little,” Rose answered, without turning around.
“You remember the stories we told about the house? Some made up, some real?”
“Kind of,” she said. “We weren’t all that close. I mean, we were the same ages, give or take a year, but we weren’t friends.”
“Really?” I asked, and there was a note of surprise in my voice that seemed to startle her. She half-turned, caught a glimpse of me, naked but for a towel around my waist, and turned away just as quickly.
I hiked up the towel to be sure I was safe, made sure it was secure, and then said, “It’s fine. I’m decent, and it’s not like we’re not related, right?”
“Right,” she said, but she took her time. I caught her giving me a glance, bottom to top and back again, before she frowned a little.
“Was it that you weren’t friends after grandmother announced the whole ‘granddaughter only’ thing, or-”
“Before,” Rose said.
“Before,” I said, considering the idea. “I considered them good friends. We exchanged emails, we looked forward to seeing each other…”
I trailed off. Rose was already shaking her head. A strand of blond hair had come loose of the pin behind her head.
Rose said, “I know Molly about as well as I knew Callan or Roxanne, which isn’t much at all. Then the ‘granddaughter only’ thing came up, and that was that. We were rivals.”
“It doesn’t upset you that she’s dead?”
“It does!” she said, “Really, it does. But… if you told me Mrs. Niles died, I’d be about as upset. Someone who was a small, peripheral part my life is now gone. It’s sad, it’s a reminder that we’re all very mortal, and there’s obviously a lot more going on besides that, with you as the heir for the property and me as… this.”
“But Molly doesn’t rate much higher than an elderly neighbor who you say hi to if you happen to see her,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Rose said. “There are nice memories, but there are bad memories too. Over and over, stuff would come up. If we weren’t dealing with a situation, we were reeling from the last one. Ways to weaken me, to take me out of the running, mom and dad sort of keeping it going. It kind of soured all the rest of it.”
“Soured it?,” I said.
She gave me a funny look. “Aunt Irene pulled strings to screw up Paige’s chances of getting into University, and she almost succeeded. Uncle Paul went crazy, Paige went crazy, and we had four straight months where I was genuinely afraid. My car got vandalized, and they emptied a can of orange juice concentrate under a seat. The frozen pulp you mix with two cans of water. By the time I realized what was going on, the smell was so bad I couldn’t drive the car, and no amount of cleaning would make it any better.”
“Doesn’t sound like Paige.”
“That one was Ellie, I’m pretty sure. She made a comment, then alluded to my brake lines, and I basically stopped driving after that. When I think of family, that’s the first thing that comes to mind.”
I couldn’t imagine giving up that independence. We were supposed to connect as we interacted, but I could only feel the differences between us getting more pronounced.
She continued, oblivious, “Those are the memories I have, which didn’t really happen, apparently. But they’re part of what make me me, whatever I am, and so I don’t have any lingering fondness for the extended family, real memories or fake.”
I nodded. “I remember sharing the stories about the house, even seeking them out, so I had tidbits to share on future visits. We’d laugh, be suitably horrified, and whatever else. Paige and Molly had it easier, because they had siblings to tap for stories. But it’s like… I could tell them how our great grandfather was a robber baron, kind of?”
There was no recognition on Rose’s face.
“He ruthlessly cut out the competition, scared people, beat them, stole from them, up until the day he hired a few goons to go beat someone up and they got caught. He ran and came to Canada, where was approached by a widow, our great grandmother. Grandmother Rose’s parents.”
“I didn’t hear that one.”
“The letter she wrote us told us that bastards tend to do better as husbands in this family than the gentlemen do. So I can’t help but think… how far back does this business with the demons and devils go? There’s a bit of bloody history tied to this family and this house. Was grandmother the first to go down that road, or has it been at play from the beginning?”
“I don’t know,” Rose said. “I don’t want it to be a big thing, because our bloodline is apparently in a kind of debt, and I don’t want to be in debt to anything like that.”
No longer comfortable with the topic, I bent down and rummaged in the cabinet beneath the sink for basic toiletries. One drawer revealed a narrow can of shaving cream with a woman’s silhouette on it. It had been there for so long it refused to budge when I tried to lift it. Further back was a plastic packet of the cheapest disposable razors around, pink.
I opted to shave anyways, tearing the can off the bottom of the drawer. Sure enough, the razor nicked me no less than five times. They had been there for so long that temperature had bent the blades.
I preferred to bleed and be clean-shaven over the alternative. Without a reflection to go by, I had to be meticulous.
It was disconcerting to see Rose standing there, studying me, when I tried to look to see if I’d missed a spot. I ran my hand over my face, searching for the roughness of scruff, then washed my face to get rid of the remainder.
“Bit of shaving cream at the back there,” Rose said, pointing to the nape of her neck.
I fixed it.
“Putting the more dangerous stuff aside, we should get to studying,” she said.
“Know what we’re up against,” I said, while drying my face. I tended to the small cuts, but it didn’t make much of a difference, with the cut already on my cheekbone.