Chapter 24
“You’re sure you heard him right?”
Nora had left the woods after only a few more words with Oliver, her mind somewhere far away from her body.
She’d made it back to the little red house on muscle memory alone, every other sense numbed by a deluge of emotion.
She still didn’t fully understand how she’d gotten herself to where she now sat, sagging over the edge of her father’s old bed, Charlie standing above her.
He looked more concerned now, staring at the pale, clammy lump of a sister in front of him, than he had at any of his near-deaths.
Nora looked up at him, her head heavy on her neck. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“ ‘Burned to the ground’ is pretty dramatic. And he wouldn’t say why?”
Nora shook her heavy head. “Not really. Just that this place shouldn’t exist. And that Dad understood. And…Charlie, there’s something else.”
Charlie gave her a look that said, “Okay, hit me.”
So Nora did. “He said Dad understood…and that’s why he died.”
They both sat in that revelation for a moment, breathing the words like salt water into their lungs.
“I don’t get it,” said Charlie at last.
“Ditto,” said Nora. She flopped down onto the covers, unable to hold herself upright any longer.
What Oliver had implied, that her father’s death was somehow connected to this place, was too much for her mind to hold.
It didn’t make sense. How could the town he’d left possibly contribute to the accident that took his life?
“I wish he was here,” she said, her voice small.
“And Mom. They both had lives before us, Charlie, whole lives we never got to hear about. It’s like we never really knew them. ”
Charlie plopped himself down beside her, Jessica hopping off his shoulder to find a perch between their heads. “I know,” he said. “But maybe that was on purpose. I mean, this place is fucking weird, Nora. Maybe Dad wanted to keep us away from that.”
“I guess.”
“There’s gotta be a reason he never brought us here, or even really mentioned Virgo Bay to us much growing up.”
Nora couldn’t argue with that, which was a rarity in their relationship. “Oliver said Dad understood why this place shouldn’t exist, but as soon as I tried to get an explanation out of him, he shut down. It’s bullshit. And it’s not like we can ask Dad about it, so we’re right back at square one.”
“Maybe not…” said Charlie, sitting up. “Charles told you Dad wrote him letters, right? We may not be able to talk to Dad, but that’s kind of the next best thing.”
“Charles also said Richard and Ruby probably got rid of them after he moved out.”
“But what if they didn’t?” said Charlie. “Look at this place. The basement is like a fucking shrine to Dad, Charles, and Patty. If they didn’t throw out Dad’s truly awful sketches, why would they throw out his letters?”
Nora blinked up at Charlie, bewildered by the sudden, uncharacteristic practicality in his words.
“Okay,” said Nora. “Say you’re right. I haven’t come across them anywhere, so where would they be?”
“Only one way to find out,” said Charlie.
He held out his hand to her, and for longer than she was proud of, she seriously contemplated not taking it, and instead simply lying there on her father’s old bed for the foreseeable future.
She had been trying so hard for what felt like so long, and yet failure met her at every opportunity.
She was on a steady diet of low sleep and high anxiety.
It felt like she had risked her life more fervently than she’d ever avoided risks before, and yet she was no closer to saving Charlie. She looked up.
Charlie. There he was, all disheveled and hairy, his hand outstretched. There was never a choice, not really. She had given up on him in many ways over the years, but when it came down to it, she would always, always take his hand. And so she did.
“I’ll check through the closet in here,” said Charlie. “Why don’t you look in that cupboard where you found Ruby’s file?”
Nora nodded, relieved not to be the one making the decisions for once.
She left Charlie in the bedroom and headed for the hall.
Upstairs, someone was rattling around in the kitchen.
Nora decided she didn’t much care who it was; at this point they were all equally untrustworthy.
She would need to be quick and quiet to avoid drawing attention to herself.
Richard and Ruby had mostly left them alone since the morning, but if Martin’s letters to Charles still existed, she wasn’t keen for them to catch her searching.
The cardboard box of case files still sat on the floor of the linen closet. Nora stared at them, wondering if they held any other secrets she had yet to uncover. She quickly thumbed through them but turned up nothing of interest aside from a hit-and-run victim with the unfortunate name of Dick Cox.
She pushed the box back into place and examined the shelves, finding only frayed childhood linens, a photo album, and a stack of encyclopedias that, judging by the thick coating of dust, hadn’t been touched in years.
She quickly shook the photo album, but no letters fell from between the leaves.
She closed the door and turned to make her way back into the bedroom, but someone was blocking her path.
Ruby. Her small but inexplicably intimidating form stood between Nora and the bedroom door. She observed her granddaughter with narrowed eyes, her face creased in a frown.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
Nora tried to remember what nonchalance looked like. It was probably the opposite of the way she looked at the moment.
“Oh, I was, um—” But she didn’t have time to lie badly before Ruby cut her off.
“Patty says you’ve been up to see Richard’s father a number of times now.”
Of course she did. Nora’s jaw clenched. This further proved that Patty was keeping tabs on the twins.
It was suddenly little wonder that Martin never wrote to his sister after he left.
Was Patty always like this? Could she have been the real reason Martin left town?
Or worse, the real reason he was dead, somehow?
“Oliver prefers his own company,” Ruby continued. “I’m asking you on his behalf to leave him alone.”
“On his behalf?” Nora spat. She knew she had to tread lightly with Ruby.
She was still living in her grandparents’ house, after all.
Say too much and she’d be putting Charlie and even herself in further danger.
But her nerves were too frayed to say nothing at all.
“Really? Because he sure had a lot to say to me when I was over there.”
Nora thought she caught Ruby’s eyes widen before she regained her steely composure. “Did he? Well, you mustn’t listen to him. He’s been off on his own a very long time. These days he doesn’t have anything of worth to say.”
“Is that why you never visit him?” said Nora.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Patty and Phil do, though,” said Nora. “Why would they visit him so often if he talks nonsense? Maybe he knows something you’d rather I didn’t.” The words tumbled out, her brain unable to catch up with her mouth. Now she’d really stepped in it, she was sure.
Ruby was radiating arctic temperatures. Nora took a step back from the small woman, bumping into the closet door. Ruby, for her part, took a step forward.
“You’re playing a game you can’t win,” said Ruby. “What goes on in this town is none of your business.”
“I—”
“For the last time, stay out of the forest, stay away from Oliver, and leave well enough alone.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a warning,” said Ruby. She eyed the closet behind Nora and shook her head, tutting at Nora’s latest breach of town privacy. Then, just as quickly as she’d appeared, she left Nora standing alone in the wood-paneled basement, more confused and more resolute than ever.
* * *
“Grandma’s a bitch,” Nora declared as she swept back into the bedroom.
“She really doesn’t want you hanging out with Oliver, huh?” said Charlie.
“You listened at the door?”
“I listened at the door.”
“What the hell is she hiding? What the hell are any of them hiding? Isn’t a town where nobody dies enough of a secret? Why does there have to be more?” Nora had crossed through exasperation and was somewhere around the utterly irate mark.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Charlie reminded her.
Right. “Any luck in here?”
Charlie shook his head. “Nothing in Dad’s closet, nothing in the desk or under the beds. Maybe Gram and Gramps really did throw them out in the end.”
“Charles did seem pretty certain,” Nora said, immediately losing hope again.
It had always been a long shot, she reminded herself.
Which brought them right back to the drawing board.
Again. And Nora had never been particularly good at drawing.
She took after her father in that regard.
She looked at the misshapen sketch of a dog, maybe, or a horse, possibly, or potentially a human in need of a chiropractor that hung above her father’s old bed; just one of the many masterpieces of visual nonsense that clung to the walls on thumbtacks.
She flopped back down on the bed, facing defeat for the umpteenth time that day, but as she collapsed onto the mattress, she noticed something she hadn’t before.
The soft breeze brought about by her falling picked up the edges of the dog / horse / twisty human and revealed lines of scribbles across the back of the page.
Nora leapt back up.
“Charlie,” she said, staring at the paper.
This time she scrambled onto the bed and pulled herself to her feet on the mattress, plucking the drawing off the wall with a rip.
She flipped it over. The blue pen scrawls were as recognizable to her as the art style of the creature on the other side.
This was her father’s handwriting; messy and impatient and too slow for his tumbling thoughts. “Charlie,” she called again.
The bed squeaked and the mattress shifted as Charlie clambered up beside her. “What’s up?”
Without a word, Nora handed her brother the letter.
Charlie barely had to glance at it before he understood exactly what he was looking at.
It was the same handwriting that had filled all their birthday cards and school lunch Post-it notes and letters from the tooth fairy.
The twins knew it better than they’d had the chance to know their father.
“This is from Dad,” said Charlie, though they both knew he didn’t have to say it.
Nora spun around on the bed, taking in the drawings scattered around the room.
She guessed ten, twelve, fifteen, maybe?
Some were tacked on top of others, just blocking the ones beneath from full view.
Others were folded oddly, as if they might be makeshift envelopes for even more.
The half-decipherable sketches of unsteady lines and comically bad proportions that had been staring down at the twins since they arrived in Virgo Bay, only half-noticed and only for a bit of loving ridicule, now seemed to hold the key to a door bolted for most of their lives.
Nora felt the room spin with her, the doodles on the walls acknowledging her as she properly acknowledged them for the first time.