Chapter 12 #2
the morning’s events or how the thought of his bare skin against hers was taking up nearly all the real estate in her brain.
“Why haven’t you come back down to Woodhill House, Thora? This is some horror movie shit.”
“It’s Juniper being Juniper. It’s good for my writing.” The high pitch of her voice was unconvincing, even to herself.
“I’m not so sure about that. Most of the shit that scared us here when we were kids was stuff we made up ourselves or normal
shit for an hold house with creaky floors and loose hinges.”
“What about that old rubber ball that just showed up one day? It would roll out from under the bed in the Blue Room one day,
and the Bird Room the next.”
“Okay, yeah, that was weird,” Mack replied. “But even if that ball arrived from beyond the quail or whatever, it was just a ball. Nothing truly scary ever happened with it.”
Given Thora’s fondness for her bedside lamp, “beyond the quail” was a perfect substitute for the source of the unexplained.
“See? Scary things happening isn’t the same as actual danger,” Thora insisted.
Mack gulped down her coffee. “I’m leaving the first aid kit here then.”
“Fine by me. Let’s go for a hike. Lee is going to do some work on the Wood Room.”
The two headed up the hill on the mountain trail that led from the kitchen door. The crisp air wafted the comforting scent
of damp earth around them. Each gust unloosed jewel-colored leaves from the branches. Citrine, amber, and ruby rained down
on them from the birches, the oaks, the maples. Thora caught a maple leaf, reminiscent of Lee’s tattoo. This one wasn’t quite
as beautiful as his.
Moonrise Mountain was named for a big boulder at the summit that made a perfect place to observe the sky. Why the mountain
was named after the moon and not the sun or stars was anyone’s guess.
On the way to the summit, they passed the property’s old garbage dump from Juniper’s earliest days. It was a great place to
find old glass bottles or contract tetanus. The windowsills in the Great Room were adorned with the best finds from the dump,
cobalt blue bottles and amber flasks that once held liquids of questionable safety.
As they hiked, Thora asked what was on her mind. “So Lee has been to Woodhill House?”
“He told you?”
“No, I saw the lock screen on his phone and instantly knew it was the view from the dock. Are you two friends?”
“I’d say so,” Mack said. The way she didn’t elaborate made Thora suspicious.
“Why did you never mention it to me?”
“Because you’re fucking weird about Lee.”
Thora stopped in her tracks. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s like your little punching bag. Somehow you’ve decided George’s death is his fault, instead of accepting that our parents’
generation and the one before them are totally dysfunctional.”
“Both things can be true.” Hearing it from her favorite cousin made the realization have a fresh sting to it.
“Lee loved George, Thora. He loved him as much as you or I did. And he stepped up. After George’s winter housesitting gigs
dried up, thanks to vacation rental apps, he had no place to go.”
“He did, though. I took that thankless job with Bryony so I could afford to put him up. There was a bedroom for him, in a
building with an elevator. Near Central Park and also, you know, doctors.”
“Enough with the martyr act. You really think George was going to move to New York City?” she said the name of the city with
an absolutely inscrutable accent, less Brooklyn and more Cockney, somehow.
“Yes, if I could have asked him before Lee forged ahead with his plan.”
“Go ahead and tell yourself that. Jade has house plants that keel over when you move them across the fucking room. And it’s
not like she doesn’t love them. You can’t just remove plants from their preferred environment.”
Thora was ready to stop fighting. She could admit—to herself and never out loud—that she was wrong and her plan was bad.
But Mack’s apt comparison of George to a finicky houseplant reminded her of her recent discovery about him.
“Wait, did you know George might have published a book in the ’70s? Called Tree & Leaf?”
Mack was uncharacteristically quiet.
“Mack?” Thora asked accusingly. Mack tried scurrying ahead on the trail, but Thora caught her and spun her around, holding
her by the shoulders. Mack’s expression was pained, sheepish.
“George wrote it. Granddad published it. Against George’s will.”
“What?” Thora yelled at such a volume that a hush fell over the woods around them. Thora had always wondered what the beef
between them was. She asked George gently more than once, and he rebuffed her queries equally gently. She was more forceful
with her Granddad, who stonewalled with a stone wall that could reach the moon. She always considered it her biggest failure
as a gossipmonger.
Now the mystery was solved, and it was sadder than it was juicy.
Tree & Leaf was something private to George, or maybe something to release to his selected audience on his own time frame. Denied that
right, he took the betrayal to his grave. Anger on her uncle’s behalf surged in Thora’s chest.
“Didn’t you wonder why he and Granddad were feuding?” Mack asked.
Thora’s laser beam glare startled Mack. She was certain she had mused aloud about this very question in front of her cousin
no fewer than a dozen times.
“I couldn’t tell you! I only know about it because I found some of the paperwork at Woodhill House and asked him. I’m the
only other person who knows. Granddad promised me Woodhill House if I kept it under wraps until his death.”
“I didn’t know you were good at keeping secrets,” Thora said bitterly.
“It might be the only thing I’m good at.”
Thora huffed.
“You can’t be mad at me! You had your shot at success by getting a full ride to your fancy college. What did I have? Getting
that house for free meant I could survive with one shitty full-time job instead of two.”
Mack had a point. It wasn’t worth risking the inheritance so Thora could know the family dirt. Elite colleges generally had
only need-based financial aid, so admission meant no bills and no debt for a sufficiently poor kid. Her aptitude for school,
and conversely, Mack’s abhorrence of it, were more luck than anything else.
How heartbreaking, though, to see how limited Mack saw her own prospects. And she’d been strongarmed into the family business
of withholding information like the unwilling scion of a mafia don. Thora was determined to do better by Mack.
“It didn’t matter anyway,” Mack continued. “The book made a lot of money at first, but Granddad immediately lost it all in
a bonsai scheme.”
“Like miniature trees?” Thora asked, befuddled.
“No, like an investment scam.”
A Ponzi scheme. Now was not the time to laugh. “What about the royalties?”
Mack picked up a long branch from the side of the trail, a good length for a walking stick. “They trickle in. Sometimes they
covered George’s groceries.”
Thora wondered whether George truly wanted to die alone at Juniper rather than move past a fifty-year-old dispute with his brother.
Her uncle was always stubborn and independent, but she could never reconcile that with the man who deeply wanted his family to support each other—Granddad aside.
“Did Granddad ever try to get George to move to Woodhill House as he was getting older?”
“No, and even if they were speaking, where was he going to go? Granddad had begun his demolition work on Woodhill House and
most of the rooms were unusable. When I moved in with Granddad after high school, I had to beg him to get a bedroom for me
into a livable condition. Were we going to put George on the couch?”
“Better than leaving him in the woods to die alone and be found by Mikey!”
“Thora, chill out.”
Maybe she wasn’t done fighting after all. “I won’t chill out about this! Think of how scary it must be to die. And then think
of what it would be like to have no one there to help, to know your body might literally traumatize the person to find it?
I know George was old and he would have died sooner than later, but he deserved better than that.”
“Yeah, but Lee helped.”
What Mack left out? And you didn’t. You had a plan that was never going to work. Guilt punched her in the stomach. She would do it all differently if she had another chance.
“Not to mention, those curtains on the kitchen window are pretty sheer. I saw you in flagrante delicata. Kissing his hand. How’s that for keeping secrets?”
Thora loved a chance to fight with Mack, because unlike Cody, Mack could dish it out. They’d get everything out on the table
and deal with it. Perhaps not the most tactful, but it was better than the seething resentment and secret-keeping that the
rest of their family favored.
“It happened this morning. It’s why I forgot to send you the text.”
“Uh . . . what happened this morning?”
Thora could feel the heat rising to her face. As much as she loved to gossip, she was always a little shy when it came to
the details of her own personal life.
“I can’t even begin to tell you what happened this morning because I don’t know myself.”
“No, I see it now,” Mack said, stamping her walking stick in the ground a few times like she was making a proclamation. “This
is one of those thin lines between love and hate things.”
Thora stopped and sat down on a log. Not only was she huffing and puffing as they gained altitude, but she was a little bowled
over by that last statement.
She had fallen for Cody hard in college, never considering Lee at all. The three of them shared a passion for their campus
paper, with so many unforgettable nights of punch-drunk laughs over room-temperature pizza and hot gossip. That whole time,
Cody was the superhero in Thora’s eyes, and Lee was his affable sidekick. She could picture Cody striding into the newspaper
office, holding a stack of pizza boxes triumphantly, like an Olympian powerlifter. He’d theatrically present Thora with a
slice of her favorite, jalapeno and pineapple, and she swooned every time.