Chapter 24
Eventually, everyone left but Thora and Lee, and Lee’s truck was still parking Thora’s Jeep in.
“Do you want to talk some more?” Lee asked. “We could go to Woodhill House.”
Unstated was the now that you’re not hysterical because of a snake and a splinter in your foot. If Lee thought fresh sunlight would change Thora’s mind about what she’d said before the fire, he was mistaken. She’d managed,
in a marvelous feat of selfishness, to waste years of both Cody’s and Lee’s lives at the same time, and she needed to free
them both. Until she could truly understand what love and loyalty were all about, she needed to be alone.
“I think you should go home,” Thora said.
Then the ashes settled, literally. Lee’s painfully cordial goodbye in that smoky morning light was a dagger straight to her gut.
He probably figured she was in capable hands.
Mack would provide food and shelter. The police and fire departments would do their work.
She’d deal with the insurance company after that.
He didn’t necessarily have a role in any of it.
He shouldn’t have a role in any of it, she reminded herself.
Given Lee’s involvement with restoring Woodhill House, she would hear about him again if not have to interact with him directly.
But she could hide out until then. She saved her notebook. Her laptop was lost to the fire, but people’s desire to help her
in this hour of need had flooded her with things, including clothing, toiletries, and even someone’s old computer.
She tried to pour herself into her writing. Although the story was traced, a maze with a clear path through, the words were
not flowing. Trying to conjure a lighthearted, childlike spirit out of the tragedy of everything that happened at Juniper
was an exercise in futility. Moreover, she was haunted by the sight of the skeleton.
It had occurred to her at points during their week at Juniper that someone may have been in the house. Over the years, the
odd hiker or drifter had taken shelter in the house during the months no one was in residence. Most people were respectful,
sometimes even leaving a note. Typically these included an apology for breaking a pane of glass to access the house alongside
their thankfulness for not freezing to death.
The knowledge that Thora and Lee had in fact been cohabitating with a stranger made her skin crawl. If she thought too long
about someone skulking around without their knowledge, she’d never sleep again. This person had lit the candle in the hallway.
They had managed to ring a bell in the Bell Room without being seen. Hell, they had pulled off a stunt with a live owl. Trying
to write while mourning her house and falling out with Lee was bad enough. Processing this violation made it all the more
difficult.
Still, she pushed ahead. She was heeding this common writing wisdom, that the key to being an author was to put one’s ass in a chair and fingers on the keyboard. Still, she was typing, not writing. If one salvageable sentence came out of this period of time, she’d take it.
Common wisdom also says to “fake it ’til you make it,” so she’d fake it, all right. She’d fake feeling good about how this
book was progressing. The Academy should recognize her for how she acted like she wasn’t devastated about losing Lee, a person
who had helped her accept her own foibles more than anyone else. Not because he accepted them himself, but because he appreciated
them. He even loved them for a time.
The insurance mess of it all kept her blessedly busy. Creating an inventory of everything lost in the fire was a necessary
if supremely frustrating task. Eventually, she would be able to return to the site for photographic evidence, but it was still
considered a crime scene. For the time being, she and Mack made diagrams and lists of everything they could remember. Mack’s
work selling off the antiques in the Junk Room had made her more familiar with what was there. Naming the items took some
translation work on Thora’s part.
“There was still a lot of valuable stuff back there, but I only took what I needed,” Mack explained. “George knew a lot more
about what was there than I did.”
“Can you describe some of the stuff? Maybe there will be remnants I can document.”
“There was definitely Limousine porcelain.”
“Limoges porcelain,” Thora narrated as she typed.
“Whatever. And a couple of rolled-up carpets. Westminster carpets.”
“Axminster,” Thora corrected.
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“Doesn’t matter. How many?” Thora made a new entry in the list.
“Let’s say two. How do you know all this stuff anyway?”
“Have you read a Bryony Brooks novel? There were more Fabergé eggs in her novels than ever existed in real life. She loved
name-dropping a luxury good, the rarer the better.”
Mack considered Thora’s words. “I don’t think George mentioned any Febreze eggs.”
“No, I don’t think our family interacted much with imperial Russia, even when we were rich. What else do you remember?”
It went on like this, every time Mack had some time to spare, until finally Thora got the phone call from the police that
they had closed the case on Juniper.
She wasn’t sure how that was possible. They never had her detail any of the bizarre behavior of the stranger hiding out in
the basement.
Possibly the person’s death in the fire made an investigation moot. Still, Thora wanted to know exactly what transpired. She
was not at peace, and she wasn’t sure how she could be until she had a cogent explanation for everything. She wanted to know
how those murmuring messages over the telephone had worked. Was it like a teen slasher movie, with the call coming from the
basement? And the person must have been skilled with handling wildlife, between the owl and the rattlesnake. Was she the only
one who cared about the truth?
“What have you concluded?” she asked the detective on the phone.
“We used dental records to identify the deceased,” he said.
Of course. “I see,” she said coolly.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it was your uncle George down there.”