Chapter 18
Thora just knew it was the same owl that had been in the Bird Room that morning that had been trapped and freed. It was trying
to tell her something. Like the mumbling phone call in the middle of the night, like the candlelit Green Man. If she could
see into this owl’s eyes in exactly the right way, she could infer something she needed to know.
The message was close at hand, but something was wrong in the translation, or there was too much static on the line. She knew
this in her heart because the only clear message she had received since being in Juniper was to touch the burning doorknob,
to reopen a wound, and that couldn’t be correct. Or maybe Juniper was harboring malevolence after all.
She and the owl beheld each other, once again entranced, until Lee appeared on the porch. He hadn’t appeared, of course, his
truck had driven up the winding driveway and he had ascended the stairs, but it wasn’t until he touched Thora’s arm that she
registered his presence.
She pointed to the branch with the owl. It was gone.
“Shit,” she said.
“What?”
“The owl, it was back. The same one, I know it.”
“Maybe it was seeking revenge for Mack’s rude treatment.”
“No, it had something to tell me.”
“Oh,” Lee said, chuckling.
After a beat, Thora saw the recognition that she wasn’t joking dawn on him. “I don’t know what it was trying to say. Anyway,
did Mack catch you? Get you the key?”
“Yes,” he said, displaying the heavy old key in his hand.
They entered the house from the porch into the Great Room. Lee went to unlock the kitchen door, while Thora went to the Bird
Room to look for her key.
The room was as they left it, bedding mussed, candlesticks gathered.
No barn owl taxidermy anymore. One less pair of eyes keeping watch over her in this room.
While Lee found the birds creepy, Thora now considered them friends. Even the live barn owl. It was trying to get a message
to her, but it was not threatening her. She wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone. Maybe George. He never saw a difference
between himself and the trees, so he would understand her kinship with the birds.
The key proved elusive. She shook out the blankets and sheets, took the pillows out of their cases, lifted the mattress, moved
the bed. She stopped to admire the portrait Lee had sketched of her, outrageously sensual, ready to light the notebook on
fire. She was definitely wearing the key in the portrait.
Lee came into the room. “Any luck?”
“None.”
They continued to look, shining a flashlight into the cracks between the floorboards, hoping the dull metal might make the barest glint under the light.
“Well shit,” she said after a few minutes of searching.
“I’m sorry,” Lee said.
Thora was shocked she hadn’t noticed the key’s absence. Its weight around her neck was a comforting presence, the knowledge
that she had a place in this world where everything felt possible. Not having it felt uncanny, like losing a tooth.
“I’m sure it’ll turn up,” Thora said, not feeling at all sure about that.
“Yes,” said Lee, in a tone that indicated he didn’t believe it either.
There had been a shift. In the house, between them. The floor beneath her, once solid, had become quicksand. She had been
laughing so much off, but she was starting to worry about getting sucked down into some bottomless void. Like the key had
been.
“I can’t believe I’m suggesting this,” Lee began, “but maybe tonight we should sleep in the Bell Room.”
“Not the fucking Bell Room,” Thora said, more as a bit than a real complaint. She had spent plenty of nights in the Bell Room,
after all. Sometimes she would lose whatever competition decided rooms. Nothing bad had ever actually happened there. There
was something about an unrung bell. An invitation for trouble, perhaps.
“No,” Thora said. “You’re probably right. The Bell Room is fine. I will move the space heater in there and we will have a
good night’s sleep.”
Lee put a hand on the small of Thora’s back. “Will we have a good night’s anything else?”
Thora felt it, that surge of pure want, rising from someplace deep inside her.
Bryony Brooks would have described the feeling as coming from the loins, but Thora wasn’t sure.
The feeling was certainly not originating in her brain, but she was starting to suspect something was happening north of the loins.
Not her heart; she couldn’t admit that. Maybe the feelings were creeping up from near the liver, perhaps the spleen. She wanted him with all her spleen.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were working on Woodhill House?” she asked.
“It never occurred to me that Mack wouldn’t have told you. I assumed you were in on everything. The antiques, the auctions,
I honestly don’t know how Mack did it without you.”
“She can be resourceful when she needs to be.”
“Are you upset with her?”
Thora was upset with herself. “No, because she tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen.”
Lee smiled knowingly.
“Shut up,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything,” he countered.
“That face said it all. If even Mack can’t get through to me, I’m a lost cause.”
“A lost cause for what?”
Damn him for not indulging her self-indulgent self-pity. “For letting anyone else change my story. I had decided you were
the villain, and I would not be swayed.”
“Sounds like something has swayed you.”
“You. You swayed me.”
“Can’t wait to see how your story turns out then.”
In her head, Thora counted the number of words in that sentence. It was ten. He could turn her world upside down in ten words.
What she wouldn’t give to be able to write a sentence like that, terse and yet expansive, giving her all the space she needed
to have. She felt a sweet ache, in her spleen probably.
They shuffled belongings around once more until they had settled into the Bell Room. Thora brought the candlesticks as well, thinking it best to keep those under close supervision. The bird taxidermy she was less concerned about.
As they moved about the house, doing nighttime routines, they kept finding reasons to touch. It made her giddy, the way he
walked into a room and immediately put himself in her orbit. Nothing about this was simple, but it felt simple. He liked her.
He liked cooking for her and touching her, and shouldn’t everything be that simple?
Oh, she could see it going all wrong. She would do something overdramatic and he would find her insufferable. Or she would
cloister herself writing until she drove him away with her aloofness.
But she remembered George. He found the world so unbearable that he simply retired from the whole thing. What could be more
dramatic than that? And he cloistered himself, essentially necessitating pilgrimages to see him. And Lee did it. Because he
loved George.
Not that it was a contest, but he probably loved him better than Thora had, difficult as that was to accept. She had a plan
for George’s life, but if she was honest with herself, it wasn’t one he wanted. It was the difference between Bryony Brooks,
with her dozens of bestsellers, and the people who sent her impotent hate mail. They always claimed to have a superior book
in them, but their names never showed up on bookstore shelves. Meanwhile, Bryony knew exactly what people wanted and gave
it to them, again and again.
Thora may have messed things up with George, but she wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. No big swings without a
realistic chance of connecting.
“Do you have a preferred side of the bed?” Lee asked her.
The side that’s next to yours, she was tempted to say. “I do sometimes get up to pee, so perhaps you take the side by the wall and I take the other one?”
she offered instead.
He climbed into bed, and she went to the bathroom to do the last of her nighttime routine.
The bell rang as she was flossing her teeth, startling her so badly that she jammed the floss into her gums. She tasted blood,
old pennies in her mouth.
Lee was already out in the hallway by the time she left the bathroom.
“I didn’t do it,” he said breathlessly.
“I believe you,” she said.
“We have to get out of here.”
He took her hand, and they ran.