Chapter 2 #3
Phone and email correspondence turned into attending in-person meetings, and eventually doctor’s appointments. Before too
long, Bryony had furnished a room in her penthouse for Thora and doubled her grocery order.
Thora loved the ease of that lifestyle. Bryony was an iconic woman. Widely derided for writing trashy potboilers, sure, but
doing it with such panache. Her author headshot was three decades old at least, shot through a lens smeared thick with Vaseline.
The beauty shot showed Bryony sensually caressing her face with a feather quill. When asked about it, she said that quill
gave her far more pleasure than any of her five husbands. Thora spent countless hours staring at those headshots as she fed
them into the vintage autopen that mimicked Bryony’s signature.
She could have taken the damn autopen with her to the Adirondacks and visited George, but Bryony always had something for her to do in Manhattan.
Maybe if she had been more forceful, she could have taken more time off and convinced George to come off the mountain and into her two-bedroom apartment a short bus ride from Central Park.
With regular medical care and gentle oversight, he might still be alive.
He might still be able to enjoy Juniper.
Instead, he was dead, and Juniper looked like a shitty generic rental property mashed up with classic Adirondack architecture.
She slid open the pocket door to the long hallway of bedrooms, and the groan it let out sounded eerily human.
“What the fuck,” said Mack.
“I’m sure it just needs some lubricant.”
“That’s what she said.”
Thora heaved a sigh.
The hallway was long, and as the house settled over the years, any step along it might take a visitor slightly uphill or down.
The effect was disorienting, like walking on the deck of a ship at sea. With every room’s door shut, there was little to illuminate
the area.
Thora turned on her phone’s flashlight, aiming it toward the bathroom door at the opposite end of the hallway.
She took one step into the space, where a floorboard creaked loudly. Suddenly, two points of light were heading toward her,
fast. Something, a little blur of brownish gray, was coming straight for her. She screamed and ducked, turning back toward
Mack.
Mack jumped back, giving the flying squirrel proper airspace to land on the table in the middle of the room. From there it
flung itself through the doorway to the kitchen.
Thora’s heart was racing, but Mack kept her cool, opening the screen door to the kitchen until the squirrel exited frantically.
“Did it touch you?” Mack asked.
“No,” Thora said.
“Ah well. I was thinking they might have a buy-one-get-one deal on tetanus and rabies shots.”
“Don’t even joke.”
“It’s only a squirrel. Remember when you found one in the desk drawer in the Wood Room?”
Thora smiled. She was looking for an envelope and discovered a squirrel, tucked into a circle amidst some old shredded paperwork.
Probably stock certificates from some defunct railroad. Uncle George liked to say houses were ecosystems, too, and she couldn’t
argue with him.
“Imagine if it had been a snake slithering down the hallway,” Mack teased.
“Fuck off with that, Dottie,” Thora said, invoking her cousin’s nickname. “You know I don’t even like thinking about snakes.”
Shivering, she entered the first room on the right and was relieved to find that the Wood Room looked exactly as it did in
her mind’s eye. This was George’s room, with its namesake paneling, a velvet settee, and a massive antique desk with a towering
collection of pigeonholes and drawers. Neither suited the rustic aesthetic of the camp, but both pieces were magnificent,
and most importantly, still in the house.
One of the pigeonholes in the desk was filled with papers, not yellowed with age. Thora pulled out the bundle and looked at
them.
Handwritten letters, all mailed from a return address in Concord, Massachusetts. They were letters from Lee. Cody’s best friend,
Thora’s nemesis, and George’s regular correspondent, apparently. Why wasn’t there a bundle of letters from her? Because she
worked her ass off instead of writing letters or visiting. She’d lost sight of how important George was to her, something
she would regret forever.
Mack wandered into the room.
“Lee was writing George letters.”
“It’s not illegal.”
Thora huffed. “I know it’s not illegal. But he’s our uncle.”
“Nothing was stopping you from writing him letters. Why are you so fixated on Lee?”
Thora set her lips in a line. “I’m not fixated, I’m angry. Look at the shitty renovations he did.”
“What are you talking about, ‘shitty’? That bathroom makes me feel like I’m on a spaceship. What if he knows about the auction?”
Ice ran down her spine. She’d carry every beam of this house off the mountain before she let Lee have anything, even the cheap-looking
backsplash tiles.
“Are the county offices still open?”
Mack looked at the place on her bare wrist where a watch would be. “Probably.”
“Let’s go. I need to find out when the auction is and how to win it.”