Signed, Sealed, and Smitten (Only Magic in the Building #7)
Chapter 1
Chapter One
Phoebe
If I ever start the retro nineties ska band I’ve been meaning to form—right after I learn how to play an instrument plus find someone who can sing—I’m naming it Oddly Specific. Because if my life has a theme, that’s it. I deal with oddly specific situations, artifacts, and people all the time.
It’s why I loved my last job. It’s why I took this new one. It’s why I’m standing on the porch of a historic mansion, staring at the etched glass of the front door, debating if it counts as breaking and entering if I’m not technically supposed to start work here until Monday. Probably not since I’ll be meeting with the executor of the Martin estate on Monday morning to get the key, bequeathed to me by the owner. Well, former owner, since bequeathals only happen after someone dies.
I press my hand to the glass to cut the glare and view inside as I ponder this. Is a posthumous job offer that comes with a key to this mansion a bequeathal? Not sure. I want it to be because I like the fancy sound of saying I’m a bequeathee—which is not technically a word, but it sounds good. It would only sound fancier if I called myself Foster Martin’s heir.
I’m not. In technical museum terms, where provenance and possession are everything, I’m nothing close to an heir. I’m a beneficiary. I grin as I straighten from my window peeping. Like a storybook urchin, I have a wealthy benefactor.
A benefactor whose will requested that I be in charge of this house, all its contents, and the property it sits on, beginning in less than forty-eight hours. As I stand here in the shade of the porch beneath the clear June sky, I am beginning to trust that this job marks a reversal of fortune in a truly disastrous year.
That’s probably why I came straight to my new workplace instead of my new apartment, leaving my brother waiting in the U-Haul idling in the driveway. Standing on this porch, Boston miles and miles behind me, feels like a turning point. Finally. I don’t want to even wait until Monday.
“Phoebe,” Daniel calls, “we can come back, but if I don’t eat right now, I’ll die.”
I jog over to the truck and lean through the open passenger window. “I’m too excited to eat. Go find something, and if it’s good, order for me. I want to look around for a few minutes, and then I promise, I’ll be done.”
“You’ve already toured it,” he says. “I don’t think much has changed since your interview.”
“Except I’m in charge now,” I tell him. “That never happens. Give me this moment.”
My older brother grins and shifts into reverse. “One tuna and jelly sandwich coming up.”
I step back from the door. “Gross and thank you,” I say as he pulls away.
I’m back on the porch before he even clears the driveway, cataloguing every detail I can. The preservationist part of my mind notes the chipped paint and a replica glass pane in the fanlight window over the front door, but my inner child is gleeful that I get the run of this nearly two-hundred-year-old home. I’ll be spending more time here than at the apartment that came with my compensation package.
The front door is locked when I try the handle, which I expect. I decide to check the rear entrance as well. I want to wander through for a few minutes, unobserved, taking it all in before it becomes my job to curate every square inch of it.
I walk around to the back, purposefully, like I belong there, and skim up the steps that lead to the kitchen. The door handle turns easily. Yay for me and nosing around inside, but I frown at the lax security. Serendipity Springs doesn’t have a crime problem that I know of, but leaving the back door of an unoccupied mansion unlocked is a little much.
The door opens into the kitchen, and it looks exactly like it did when I toured last month. Foster Martin, my benefactor, died four months ago. Although I was sad to hear it after getting to know him as a trustee on the Sutton Museum board, I had no idea it would directly affect me. Then his estate reached out to me two months ago to share the startling terms of his will.
Foster Martin had left his beautiful home to the city of Serendipity Springs to become a city museum, complete with an endowment for its maintenance and operations. But there were some odd conditions, including the provision that I be offered the job of being the museum’s first director.
Not that I’m a bad choice. I’m a great choice! But odd that he specified I should be offered the position without having to apply. Before it would even be listed on industry job boards for other candidates to apply.
I pass through the modernized kitchen and around the hallway restroom, knowing what’s really drawn me in this morning.
The library .
The library both little girl and fairytale heroine dreams are made of.
It’s not huge, exactly. But it’s striking for the sheer number of books lining its walls and climbing all the way to the twelve-foot ceilings. Sunlight floods through a tall window overlooking the rear of the estate, and I wince, going over to close the heavy drapes. I already know some of the priceless books in this collection, and they absolutely should not be exposed to the damaging effects of direct sunlight. Growing up in Florida, I witnessed the horror of what too much sun does to shriveled humans; it’s no kinder to books.
With the books now marked safe from vitamin D exposure, I flip the switch beside the door and turn on the domed chandelier to wash the room in mellow light. Walnut shelves line every wall and stretch to end in cornices near the ceiling. I will spend time soon verifying the cataloguing, but today, it isn’t the thousands of leather- and cloth-covered books that lured me here.
No, it’s the ladder.
The fairytale ladder. The rolling ladder. The Professor Henry Higgins in his library ladder. The Belle in the bookseller’s shop, singing about her provincial life ladder.
I’ll spend all my future time in this library—house—as museum director in my sensible suits and professional demeanor. But today, I will grant myself one small fantasy coming true. Show me a girl who loves to read who hasn’t had the same fantasy, and I’ll show you—nothing. That girl doesn’t exist.
I wipe my palms on my cutoffs and go to the ladder. My Adidas are better suited for this than my “work” shoes anyway. I climb up a couple of rungs and glance around. I grin. This is pretty cool. I look up to where the ladder hooks onto its rail and do some side-to-side shaking action to test its sturdiness. Solid. Excellent .
I am so doing this.
It takes a minute to figure out the best mechanics for launch, but I find by pushing off the very edge of one of the shelves, careful not to scrape the wood or touch any of the book spines, I can sail a few feet down the rail. So I do. A few times.
It gives me the same giddy feeling as the Mad Hatter spinning teacup ride, and my inner child can’t hold her peace any longer. I go full Belle, except I can’t remember more than one line of her song, so I make up my own lyrics as I send myself gliding again.
“There goes Hayes Bradford, a big jerk like always, his dumb hair in a big swoop”—push-glide—“and in case you didn’t know, I’ll tell you where to go, because your jerkface landed me in the poop.” My voice is bad and my lyrics are worse, but I laugh, because this is the first time in three months I’ve had pure fun.
I do another glide I’ll dub the full Belle: one hand and foot on the ladder, leaning forward with a ballerina arm stretching toward another book ahead of me. I probably look like a Muppet, but I feel like Belle, and I sing some more lyrics, going full operatic style to match my dramatic ladder swooping. “I’ve landed on my feet, because me you can’t defeat, and I can’t wait until someone gives you the scoooooop.”
A sound cracks through the library, and I squeak and lose my balance, grabbing the side of the ladder with both hands. The momentum causes the ladder to come to a stop as my body swings around it, me now clinging to the side of it, my anchor leg hooked around it while the other one dangles.
A man leans against the doorway, finishing up a slow clap with one more loud crack.
“Truly awful,” he says, straightening. “Now, who are you, and why are you in my grandfather’s house?”