Chapter 21
The little red house had been invaded. Nora returned to find Patty in the living room with Richard and Ruby. Her eyes ping-ponged from suspect to suspect, finally landing on the empty seat where her brother should have been.
“Where’s Charlie?” she demanded.
“The girl has a catchphrase,” Richard muttered.
“He’s downstairs with a stomachache,” said Patty. “I keep trying to check on him but he’s locked the door.”
Good, thought Nora. He’s finally using sense.
“I thought you were bringing that to Vic,” Nora said, jutting her chin towards the rope Patty held in her lap.
Patty looked down to the rope, then back up to Nora, her expression verging on sheepish. “I got a bit sidetracked.”
Nora didn’t bother dignifying that obvious lie with a response. Instead she hurried through the kitchen and down the stairs to the basement. She rapped on the bedroom door with one crooked finger.
“Charlie? It’s me. You okay in there?”
The lock clicked and the door opened. Charlie stood in its wake with Jessica perched on his shoulder. Both looked more disheveled than usual.
“Patty brought a rope,” said Charlie.
“I saw.”
“That’s a fucking weird thing to bring to your parents’ house, right?”
“It’s not great.”
Nora stepped inside the room and locked the door behind her. “How long has she been here?”
“She got here about ten minutes after you left.”
Shit. Nora’s gut was right. She should’ve come straight back.
“And you’ve been holed up in here since?”
Charlie nodded.
“Okay. Good. You did good, Charlie.”
“It wasn’t me,” said Charlie. “I heard Jessica start flapping around and going nuts pretty much as soon as Patty got here. I had to stomp around a bunch and pretend my foot was asleep so Gram and Gramps wouldn’t hear her.
Then I made up some bullshit about having tummy troubles and got my ass back down here before anyone could ask any questions. ”
Nora looked at the bird, who looked back at her with nothing behind her eyes.
“Did you get anything out of Uncle Charles?” added Charlie.
Nora shook her head. “Not much. Apparently, Great-Grandpa Oliver is a bit of a hermit, but he wasn’t always.
No idea what changed, or why he’d need to be even more isolated than he already was in a place like this.
I think…” Even as the words were coming out of her mouth, she regretted them.
“I think I need to talk to him directly.”
That stone house drowning in trees flashed into her mind’s eye, the hunched man with the bright white hair and dark eyes staring back at her.
“Cool,” said Charlie. “I’ll come with.”
“Absolutely not,” Nora said. “It isn’t safe. We don’t know the story with him yet.”
“Nor, either I stay here with Lasso Patty and the world’s sketchiest grandparents, or I come hang out with you and a guy old enough to remember the day the Titanic sank. Even if Great-Grandpa is evil, I feel like I could take him.”
“What if he has a gun?”
“Then the reverberation is going to shatter him into a bunch of little old man shards. So, we going to Little Red Riding Hood this shit or what?”
* * *
A soft drizzle had blown in during Nora’s time inside, the damp sinking down to her bones as they trudged through the forest. The twins had managed to sneak out the side door undetected while Charlie’s possible would-be killers carried on chatting in the living room.
Now they were up to their toes in mud, a ceiling of trees letting only choice raindrops through to splash on their faces at odd intervals.
The path had mostly turned to a squelching sludge, which Nora was growing both accustomed to and more annoyed by with each soggy forest step.
“So, are we thinking this guy’s in on it or what?” Charlie was shaking the rain from his hair like a dog.
“No,” said Nora. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. But I feel like he’s connected to it all somehow. The town’s just letting him rot out here in the middle of the woods alone. There must be a reason for that.”
“And that reason’s connected to why someone wants to kill me?”
“Could be. It’s all I’ve got right now. Unless you have a better idea?”
“One time an ex wanted to kill me because I used all of her overpriced bodywash trying to loosen my phone when it got stuck in a storm drain.”
“Did you waste all the bodywash of someone in Virgo Bay?” Nora asked.
“No, and I didn’t waste Lexi’s either. It worked. It also ruined my phone, but it worked.”
Nora just sighed and kept walking. They reached the stone house a short while later, its gray facade poking discreetly through the trees.
The air around it seemed heavier than normal, the sky a little darker.
Nora’s stomach filled with acid at the prospect of going back inside.
Charlie, on the other hand, seemed to have no such misgivings.
He strolled up to the front door with the confidence of a well-costumed kid on Halloween, secure in the knowledge of a full candy bar waiting on the other side.
He gave the door a knock, paused for less than three seconds, and then plowed his way inside.
“You coming?” he asked Nora over his shoulder.
Regrettably, she was.
The interior was as dark and unwelcoming as Nora remembered it, the gloom of the day beyond reaching eerie hands inside, running fingers of bleak shadows into every corner.
“Maybe you should wait outside,” Nora whispered. This only prompted Charlie to take another step inside. He scanned their surroundings, running his eyes over each dusty surface.
“Bet you this place is haunted as fuck,” he whispered back.
Nora shook her head, despite the same thought having occurred to her when she’d first visited. “S.C.Y.T.H.E. has systems in place to minimize the creation of ghosts,” she explained. “Besides, no one dies out here, remember?”
Charlie took another step into the belly of the house. “Where do you think the old guy’s hiding?”
“He was upstairs last time I was here,” said Nora. “We should—”
“Hello?” Charlie shouted, shattering the stillness of the house and Nora’s nerves in one fell swoop.
“Charlie!” Nora snapped, giving his upper arm a hearty smack.
“What? We’re here to see him, right? May as well get this party started.”
The floor upstairs creaked. Nora knew that creak.
The sound sent a chill rolling down her spine that landed somewhere around her knees.
Her skin rose with the unbidden pattern of goose bumps.
From somewhere upstairs came the step, shuffle, step, shuffle she’d heard while hiding inside the nursery closet.
Her breath caught as the sound hit the top step and started its descent.
Reflexively, she ducked behind Charlie. Then, remembering who was truly at risk here, stepped in front of him.
Step, shuffle, step, shuffle.
Nora thought her heart might burst through her ribs and start a new life on its own somewhere far away from here.
Maybe Las Vegas. Finally the nearly fluorescent white hair emerged atop the dark eyes, sunken cheeks, and stooped back.
Nora fought against herself to hold her nerve.
She braced, scanning through a million sentences in her head, desperate to find the perfect one to make this exchange okay.
“Hey, Pops,” Charlie said from behind her. She turned around to find him giving the old man a wave.
Oliver Bird narrowed his eyes at the twins. He cleared his throat, the rumble dry and wheezy.
“You’re Martin’s children, then,” he said. His voice was what Nora imagined it would sound like if dust could speak. She nodded her reply.
The old man nodded back and walked to the rocking chair in the living room, lowering himself into it with a grunt.
He faced away from the twins, his feet stretching out in search of the warmth from the healthy fire crackling in the belly of the fireplace.
Nora had never seen anyone so unaffected by having their home invaded.
Oliver picked a book up from the floor beside the rocking chair and opened it, flipping through weathered and dog-eared pages until he’d settled on a passage that intrigued him.
Nora gave Charlie a look that said, “He knows we’re still here, right?”
Charlie shrugged and took a step forward. “Uh, so, nice place you got here.”
The old man turned the page.
“Bit out of the way, but…nice.”
“It’s got good bones,” Nora added awkwardly. “You built this yourself?”
Oliver didn’t look up from his book, though his sigh was enough to tell Nora he could hear her.
“You kids staying long?”
“We didn’t mean to bother you,” Nora said.
“I mean in Virgo Bay.”
“Oh,” said Nora. “Maybe.”
He turned another page.
“That’s not why we’re here though,” Nora continued, still not quite sure how to speak to someone who so clearly didn’t want to be spoken to. “We wanted to talk to you. And to meet you, of course.”
“Of course,” said Oliver. He turned another page.
“May we sit?”
“Don’t see anyone stopping you.”
Nora sat herself on the only other chair in the room. Charlie opted to crisscross himself onto the living room rug. Nobody spoke. Nora could hear the old man’s breaths. The house settled around them, for real this time. Somewhere far away a clock ticked, or maybe that was in Nora’s imagination.
“You wanted to talk to me,” Oliver said at last.