Chapter Nine #2
“Is there a key?” I cross my fingers under the table. The fact that Britannia favored the tower has only increased my gut instinct. I need to see whatever lies behind that door.
“Long lost,” Lord Shilling says.
No! I look at Eleanor, hoping he’s bluffing, but she shakes her head too.
“I’m afraid it’s been missing for decades, dear. I couldn’t bring myself to go up there for a long time after Britannia died, and when I finally felt able, the key had disappeared.”
“Isn’t there a spare?” I say, desperate. What kind of a castle doesn’t have a big old bunch of spare keys?
“Bit odd, really. That’s missing too,” Eleanor said. “I always thought it was a sign that it was best left.”
I can’t believe this. How can you live in a place for years with a locked room you can’t access?
I know it’s a castle and all that, but it would drive me nuts.
In fact it is driving me nuts, and I’m only living here temporarily.
I bid them farewell and leave them to their game, hoping that Barty and Lois might be more forthcoming.
If all else fails, there’s always a locksmith.
I ease Babs to a juddery standstill and sit in the quiet cobbled alley at the side of the building beside Blithe Spirits for a few minutes before I head inside.
I’ve come back to grab some things for my stay at Maplemead and to let my folks know I’m not going to be around for a few days.
I won’t lie; I know it’s going to go down like a lead balloon.
No, worse than that. Like a lead airship.
It’s a little before five o’clock, so my mum will still be up front closing up shop for the day and if I know Gran she’ll be in the kitchen popping the cork on a bottle of champagne.
Reaching over to the glove box, I give it a halfhearted thump and pull out my Magic 8 Ball.
Turning it over in my hands, I consider what I need an answer to.
Is it a bad idea to live with Fletcher Gunn at Maplemead for the next couple of days?
After a moment, the water clears.
“Concentrate and ask again.”
God, I hate it when it says that! I frown and try to work out what is the real question I need an answer to. After a couple of quiet minutes, I spin it and try again.
Am I getting in over my head with Fletcher Gunn?
“Signs point to yes.”
Oh God. I think about shaking the ball again, but what if it comes up with the same answer?
Or an even more decisive one? What will I do then?
I know myself well enough to know that it won’t make any difference to the outcome; I’ll just throw myself headlong into disaster because that’s what I always do.
At some point in my life I might start to behave as if I understand that you can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome, but today is not that day.
It can’t be, because even though I know perfectly well that staying overnight under the same admittedly massive roof as Fletch is a bad plan, I’m going to follow through on it anyway.
I just need to go inside and break it to my mother.
“No way. Absolutely and categorically no.”
We are in my mother’s kitchen, the setting of so many of my life’s most important conversations, and I’ve just told them that I won’t be around for the next few days because Lois and Barty have asked me to stay over at Maplemead.
The conversation was relatively calm to begin with; in fact, I’d go as far as to say that Mum was quite keen on the idea.
“A minibreak in a castle! How lovely,” she said, flipping pancakes.
“So there will be just you and that dog in the whole castle?” Gran asks, sipping her champagne innocently.
That pancake is almost on the table. I draw the sugar bowl closer in readiness and lean back on my chair legs to grab cutlery from the drawer.
Have you ever tried to shake your head while also saying yes in order to give out mixed signals?
I try and do it now to throw them off the scent, at least until I have that pancake in my possession.
“Was that yes or no?” My mother demands verification, clutching the plate to her chest for leverage.
“It’s a no,” I mumble, flipping the lid on the maple syrup.
So what if it’s going to be a double sugar hit?
How can that be anything but a good thing?
I’ve already eaten a massive wedge of Artie’s mother’s chocolate cake while I was throwing things into my overnight bag in my flat just now.
I needed it to fuel up after the day I’ve had so far and I used it to distract me from the fact that I was packing for an impromptu slumber party with Fletcher Gunn.
I had a minicrisis over whether to pack my fluffy black pajamas.
I like to think I channel Black Widow when I’m wearing them, but I fear I’m more like a small furry bat.
Not Batwoman. Just a bat. Not that it matters, because there’s no way Fletch is going to see me in my furry Black Widow–slash–fruit bat costume, but what if there’s a fire or something?
I slipped my mint silk Hollywood starlet robe in too just in case, while trying not to remember my ridiculous claim to sleep in the nude like Marilyn Monroe.
Seriously, what’s wrong with me sometimes?
So the van is packed and now I just need to wrestle that pancake from my mother, tell her as little as possible without telling actual lies, and get out of there as fast as possible.
“You’re not making yourself clear, Melody. Who else is staying at the castle with you?”
Oh man, that was direct. I almost wince and make a bit of a vague face. “A few people. Couple of girls, couple of guys. It’s going to be fine, Mum, honestly.”
She doesn’t move a muscle, and the plate stays where it is. “Who?”
Balls. Fine. “Leo, Nikki, and Vikki are staying there too.”
My mother starts to shake her head. “Oh no. No, no, no. Those girls are not your friends, remember?”
Even Gran seems mildly perturbed. “Sleep with one eye open, darling,” she says.
“If it helps, they’re not staying in the main building with me. Barty Letterman gave them one of the turrets. It’s completely separate. They have their own front door and everything. In fact, they’re technically going to be my neighbors, not housemates. I can lock them out.”
My mother’s expression softens a fraction.
She can’t be blamed for not trusting the creepy twins; they’ve been fairly murderous toward me in the past and have had more than one tangle with the police.
She advances toward me with the plate and then, at the last moment, my gran tips her head to one side and counts slowly on her bony fingers.
“Couple of girls, couple of guys,” she says.
It’s enough of a nudge for my mother, who narrows her eyes at me. “Who is he?”
“Who is who?” I whisper and shoot Gran a death stare for coming between me and my pancake.
“A couple of guys, you said. Leo is one. Who is the other?”
I could practically lick the edge of the plate it’s so close.
“Reporter,” I say, making quite an impressive job of not moving my lips.
If this agency gig doesn’t work out, maybe there’s a future for me as a ventriloquist. I shoot my gran the evil eye again as I imagine her perched on my knee as my champagne-swilling, shit-stirring dummy. It doesn’t help.
“What did you say?” my mother groans, craning her neck forward.
“She said reporter, Silvana,” Gran says very loudly, and shrugs at me when I bare my teeth at her.
My mother swishes her curtain of silver hair viciously over one shoulder. “You better not be about to tell me it’s Fletcher bloody Gunn.” My family hates Fletch with a robust passion; my crotch couldn’t have picked a worse subject to feel amorous toward.
“It’s Fletcher bloody Gunn,” I say, clear and loud to deny my gran the satisfaction of repeating me a second time.
“I knew this was a bad idea. Of all the reporters in all the world, why did they have to send him?”
I sigh. “He said he was the only one available.”
And that’s when my mother says: “No way. Absolutely and categorically no.”
I could point out that I’m twenty-seven and don’t even live with her anymore, so she doesn’t actually have any jurisdiction over what I do and whom I do it with, but that will not help my pancake cause in the slightest, so I don’t.
“It’ll be fine,” I say breezily, as if it’s nothing, perfectly normal to be sleeping with the enemy. Not that I’m sleeping with him, of course.
“In which universe will it be fine, Melody? The one where Fletcher Gunn is not a megalomaniac hack intent on ruining us, column inch by column inch?” She isn’t shouting, exactly; more loud, aggressive talking.
I feel my patience slip. “In the universe where I offered to let a member of the press shadow me instead of them having to shadow you two, remember?”
She smacks the plate down on her side of the table, gripping the edges of it until her knuckles turn white. “Yes! Shadow you at work! In the daylight, not in a castle on your own at night!”
“What do you think we’re going to do?” I ask, exasperated.
“Play hide-and-seek?” Gran asks, and we both glare at her.
“I think you’re going to stay right here in this building until tomorrow morning,” my mother growls, as if I’m fifteen again.
“No,” I say, quiet and serious. “No, Mum, I’m not.
I’m a grown woman, and when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.
I’m not that keen on the idea myself, if I’m perfectly honest. But if staying under the same roof as Fletcher Gunn is what it takes to get the job done in time for Lois and Barty to welcome the film crew to a ghost-free Maplemead in a few days’ time, then that’s exactly what I’m going to do. ”
She knows that short of tying me to the chair, she cannot stop me, so she takes the only action available to hit me where it hurts.
Stamping her foot down viciously on the pedal of the bin beside the kitchen counter, she upends the plate, and we all watch the pancake tumble and flip its way toward the trash.
It’s almost slow motion, and it takes everything I have not to hurl myself over the table to catch it before it lands, half in and half out of the bin.
Slowly, I flip the lid back down on the syrup, and with as much dignity as a girl can muster in pigtails and a Rainbow Brite T-shirt, I shove my chair back and sweep out of the kitchen.
Bollocks. I forgot the frigging dog.
For a moment I contemplate leaving him behind, then I grit my teeth and fling the door open just in time to see Lestat dragging the pancake slowly out of the bin.
He rolls his shifty eyes at me, a silent “don’t you judge me,” as he tries to hoover it up.
Furious, I haul his fat ass up off the floor and carry him, pancake and all, from the kitchen without a word.
“Would he like sugar on that?” my mother yells as I slam the kitchen door in a temper, push the dog into the van, and pull out of the alleyway in a belch of exhaust fumes.
Lestat grumbles on the seat beside me as I wind the window down, rip what’s left of the soggy pancake from his jaws and fling it at Blithe Spirits’ window before I wheeze off down the High Street, turning the air inside the van blue as I go.