Chapter 16
They returned to the little red house to find it empty of all but its primary residents.
Ruby had gone to bed while Richard finished cleaning up the mess in the kitchen.
The walls directly around the oven were singed, and the coat of ash on the floor was currently being herded into neat piles by Richard’s broom, but otherwise the room seemed as it had been.
Nora walked in, grabbed the dustpan from the counter, and held it for Richard, in part to be helpful and in part to distract him while Charlie scrambled downstairs with the contraband Jessica, hoping not to be seen.
“Thanks,” Richard said, smiling over the ash at his granddaughter.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” said Nora. “You and Vince seemed to have everything under control. It was impressive. Not something I could’ve done. Fires are terrifying. I don’t even like birthday candles.”
Richard gave a hearty chuckle at that. “I’m sure you’d do just fine in an emergency. You are a Bird, after all. We’re built of tough stuff. Even Charles.”
Nora emptied the dustpan into the garbage under the sink, swallowing her disagreement with a polite smile. She might be a Bird, but she was built mostly of multivitamins and anxiety.
Charlie materialized in the doorway and gave Nora a discreet thumbs-up. Jessica had been safely smuggled back into the bedroom. Nora gave a small nod back, then looked at Richard as he struggled to his feet.
“Any idea how the fire started?” she asked as casually as possible. Charlie sidled up beside her, his own interest less subtly worn on his face.
“It’s the strangest thing,” said Richard. “Some of the oven’s wire covers were cut, leaving the wires exposed.”
“Cut?” Nora echoed. Charlie gave her a look that said, “Yup, that tracks for a murderer.”
“Well, damaged,” Richard quickly corrected. “It seemed to be working just fine yesterday, but I suppose that’s what happens when you use the same appliances for too long. I’ll have to get Phil down here tomorrow to see what he can do with the old thing.”
“Phil,” Nora echoed again, temporarily forgetting how to form words of her own.
Phil had been there that morning, then again that afternoon.
He had the tools and the knowledge to do something like this.
Nora still couldn’t quite fathom why he’d want to, but right now the why didn’t matter as much as the who and the how, so it would remain an if rather than a when.
“Oh that’s right, he’ll be working on your car tomorrow, won’t he?”
“Car,” Nora repeated.
“We do keep that boy busy.”
Nora wasn’t listening. Instead she was imagining all the ways Phil could sabotage her car.
If he could expose some wires in the oven and set the kitchen on fire, cutting the brakes on a Honda Civic would be a breeze.
Or maybe he’d do something to start a fire there too.
Maybe that was his thing. Not that that would explain the knife situation, but a man could have range.
“Nora?”
Nora blinked at the sound of her name.
“Sorry,” she said. “What was that?”
“I said he seems keen to have you both here. Phil’s not usually quite so lively,” said Richard. “Must be nice for him to finally have some folks in town closer to his age. He always used to joke about how much he’d hate having newcomers around, but I guess he’s changed his tune.”
* * *
Nora held Charlie’s case file open and propped against her raised knees.
Across the bedroom, Charlie was already asleep, Jessica perched on the pillow beside his head.
Nora furrowed her brows at the dancing smudge of smoky black that held Charlie’s cause of death somewhere inside, trying to decipher the indecipherable once again.
Jessica abandoned her post on Charlie’s pillow and made her way to Nora, seeking attention wherever she could get it.
She climbed the wooden bedpost and hopped onto Nora’s knee, peering down at her expectantly.
“What do you want?” Nora said without looking up from the file.
Jessica just stared at her intently.
Nora sighed. “We really need to have a chat about boundaries,” she said as the parrot bopped her little head up and down. “Unless you think you can make sense of this?”
The bird made no attempt to make sense of anything. In fact, her rapt attention only made the whole thing seem harder to unravel. Nora closed the file and lowered her knees, letting Jessica hop her way over her torso so they were face-to-face.
“Phil,” she said, thinking out loud. “Richard says he doesn’t like outsiders for some reason.
If he’s the one who lives in the woods, maybe he’s hiding something there.
Something so terrible he doesn’t want anyone finding out about it.
The townspeople might know not to go into the forest, but outsiders wouldn’t, right?
So maybe he…maybe he wants to kill Charlie so we don’t discover whatever’s out there in the forest. And maybe he’s not trying to kill me because… because….”
“Forest,” Jessica squawked. “Let’s go play in forest house.”
“Well, that was creepy,” said Nora. “Do you ever say anything that isn’t swearing or weird?”
“Let’s go play in forest house,” Jessica repeated.
“Okay. Tomorrow I’m teaching you boundaries and decent conversational skills.
” Nora chanced a look down the foot of her bed to the locked bedroom door.
The knob had remained still, no sound of footsteps on the other side for as long as they’d been in bed.
There were no windows down there by which someone could break in, and nothing appeared to be booby-trapped.
Nora’s eyelids each weighed roughly as much as a full-grown Great Dane. She gave Jessica a groggy glance.
“I need to sleep,” she announced. “Sleep deprivation increases the risk of heart attacks and stroke. I need to sleep. Jessica, this shift is on you. If anything dangerous happens, scream. Blink twice if you understand me.”
Jessica stared at her a beat, then blinked once, more from the right eye than the left.
“That’s going to have to do,” said Nora. She left the lights on just in case, rolled onto her side, and drifted into a restless sleep.
* * *
The next morning, Nora awoke to find the room unchanged from the night before.
Charlie was still asleep, the steady rise and fall of his chest confirming his status as not dead.
Jessica was back on his pillow, and the bedroom door was as firmly closed and locked as it was possible for a door to be.
Nora checked her watch. It was just after seven thirty a.m. If yesterday was anything to go by, her grandparents would likely not yet have left for their morning walk.
Good. She needed to talk to Richard. He was on a rapidly shrinking list of people who hadn’t actively done something to make Nora suspect them of wanting to kill Charlie, which was the best she had to work with right now.
She went upstairs to find Richard tidying the stack of magazines on the living room coffee table, his broad form hunched over the low surface.
“Morning,” Nora greeted as cheerily as she could manage.
Richard turned around. “Oh, good morning, Nora. I figured you kids would still be asleep at this hour.”
“Well, Charlie is,” said Nora. “And will be for a good while. He’s really good at sleeping.” She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand, still drowsy. Sleep was just one of the many ways the twins were different. “Actually, I had a question for you.”
“Go for it,” said Richard.
Nora glanced around. “Where’s Ruby?”
“Oh, she’s just in the shower. She should be down in a sec.”
Nora nodded as casually as possible. The old woman had secrets, big ones, and until Nora knew them she couldn’t trust her.
“Charlie and I took a little walk into the woods yesterday,” she began.
Richard seemed to subtly, almost imperceptibly stiffen at this.
Or did Nora imagine that? She continued, “We came across an old house out there. I was just wondering about it. Seems like a weird place for a house when there’s so much cleared land around. ”
“Oh that,” said Richard, straightening, his expression unreadable. “That was my father’s house, the first house built in Virgo Bay, as it happens. There used to be a path through town to his front door, but it’s become overgrown over time.”
“Who lives there now?”
Richard paused. “Now? No one. It’s been vacant for years. I wouldn’t go venturing out there, if that’s what you’re angling at. It was already fairly ramshackle when I was a boy; I would bet it’s deteriorated into a real death trap by now.”
Death trap. That was certainly one way to put it. “But there was smoke coming from the chimney,” Nora said, almost in spite of herself. She needed answers; she had no way of saving Charlie without them. That meant she had to ask questions, no matter the risk. She hated all of this.
“Nora, your grandmother says you’ve been asking about her life before Virgo Bay.
I understand you’re curious—you’ve just discovered this whole facet of your past you never even knew existed.
And I’d like to answer as many questions as I can.
But we’ll take things one day at a time, okay?
Life out here…it’s complicated. Now, what has your grandmother told you? ”
“What we tell everyone, dear.” Ruby appeared at the top of the stairs, looking down at her husband. “That Virgo Bay is a special place.”
Nora looked between them. Her tiny, fleece-clad grandmother had just silenced Richard with a single sentence. Richard offered Nora a tight smile and went to the hallway to put on his boots.
“You have a lot of questions,” Ruby said as she walked down the stairs and joined Nora in the living room.
“And you have answers,” Nora said. “Why don’t you want to tell them to me?”
Ruby’s face softened into what almost looked like a sad smile. “Some things require patience, Nora. Stay here long enough and you’ll understand.”
* * *
By the time Charlie woke up, their grandparents were already well into their daily walk. Nora had Charlie’s file open next to Ruby’s on the kitchen table. She was bouncing back and forth between the two when Charlie stumbled in, scratching the scruff on his face.
“Any idea what’s killing me today?” he asked.
“Look at this,” Nora said in place of a response.
She jabbed a finger at the “cause of death” section in Ruby’s file.
The space was blank. “And then yours.” She pointed to the inky blob on Charlie’s file.
“Ruby said she was supposed to die by heart attack, but her cause of death is empty. That means something happened to erase her cause of death, right? Possibly the same something that’s happening to yours.
She’s still alive and it’s been decades.
I think that means you can live too. I just need to figure out how.
She’s keeping secrets, Charlie. And so is Richard.
Hell, this whole town seems to be. And a lot of them are about that house in the woods. ”
Charlie took this all in quietly from the chair beside her. Finally he said, as though it were obvious, “So we go to the house, then.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Seems simple enough. If there’s something about that house that nobody here wants us to know, then we gotta go know about it.”
“Charlie. Jesus. You have the self-preservation skills of a lemming. We can’t just go to the house of secrets in the middle of the woods that everybody wants to keep us from.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Charlie. That’s how you die. We go there and the killer is waiting and then you’re dead. You know, that thing we’re trying to avoid?”
“If nobody’s talking, then how else are we gonna get answers?” Charlie asked.
Nora deflated. He was right. He was dumb, but he was right.
If their family had anything to say about it, whatever was hiding in that house would remain hidden.
The only way to learn what it was, and what it had to do with saving Charlie’s life, was to go there and find out for themselves. No, not themselves.
“I’ll go,” said Nora, fighting every risk-averse cell she was made of. “If there’s a killer there, you need to stay away.”
“Because you’re killer-proof?”
“No, but as of right now I don’t seem to be a target.”
“Breaking into a killer’s house might change that.”
Nora knew that. Of course she knew that. She’d already run through three different scenarios ending in her murder before Charlie had finished his sentence. But what other choice did she have?
“I’ll be fine,” Nora lied.
Charlie gave her a look that said, “I know you’re lying, but I appreciate it all the same.”
“All right,” Nora said, already regretting it, “I’m going now, before I realize what I’m doing.
Stay put, and stay away from…I guess everybody, if you can.
” She grabbed a small, serrated knife from the block on the kitchen counter and stuffed it into her coat pocket, just in case.
Charlie stood and looked as if he might try to stop her from leaving, but the resolution on Nora’s face forced him back into his seat.
Nora didn’t know if it was the sleep deprivation or sheer desperation allowing such wanton recklessness, but she vowed not to examine it too closely until she was safely back in the little red house with answers, and a way to save Charlie.
If she was ever back in the little red house again.