8. Renee
RENEE
“You’re sure this is it?”
Drew nods, leaning on the side of the car as he surveys the house.
“I’m sure of it. I remember the chairs on the front porch.”
I chew my lip. I feel as though I am at my wits’ end here, after coming all this way, trying to make sense of what is going on. With the box in my hands, I know I have to find some way to get into it, and I can’t bear to give up now, when it feels like I have come so close.
“Let me,” Drew tells me gently. “She might remember me, I don’t know.”
“You think?”
“Good a reason as any, right?”
I smile at him slightly, glad that he seems so willing to take the risks that I am too scared to. I watch as he makes his way up the creaking steps towards the door, the old wooden cabin so delicate it looks like it could be blown away by a stiff breeze.
It’s hard to believe anyone would still be living there after all this time, but in small towns like this, people often dug their heels in and didn’t let anything move them.
Even if whoever’s here is willing to just let us in to take a look around, we will be closer to figuring things out than when we started.
I watch as Drew knocks on the door, and silence fills the air. For a moment, I think that nobody is going to answer, but then, I hear a creak from inside the house, and the door opens, revealing an old woman standing there draped in a shawl.
Her face is creased with wrinkles, her white hair pulled back into a severe bun, and she looks Drew up and down with abject confusion.
“What do you want?” she asks. Drew lowers his head in greeting.
“Sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” he tells her. “I don’t know if you remember me, but?—”
“Hold on,” she remarks, and she takes a step back, squinting at him for a moment. “Are you one of the boys who cleared away my husband’s furniture when he died?”
“I am,” he replies, a grin spreading over his face. “You remember me?”
“I have a good memory for faces,” she replies, and, at last, she looks past him and locks eyes on me. “And who is she?”
I take a step forward, still clutching the box, not sure if I should let her see it yet or not.
“I’m Renee,” I introduce myself. “I— my grandfather was the one who got your husband’s wardrobe after he passed. And I found this notebook in the bottom of it, and it had a map in it.”
Now that I am saying it, it sounds ridiculous, but I guess I just have to try to be honest.
“A map?” she replies, cocking an eyebrow. I pull out my phone, rushing up the steps to show it to her.
“Yeah, like this.”
She looks down at it, and the moment she lays eyes on it, something in her face seems to soften.
“Oh, Carrington,” she murmurs. “Of course you would do something like this.”
A rush runs up and down my spine.
“Carrington?” I whisper. “Is that… is that your husband?”
She nods.
“Yes,” she replies. “I think you should come in. I’m Annie, by the way. Would you like some tea...?”
She leads us inside, and brews us up a pot of tea on the stove, as Drew and I sit at the uneven old dining table on mismatched chairs; as I glance around the kitchen, I can’t help but be reminded of my grandfather’s place, all the little trinkets lined up on shelves between the plates and cups.
And I can’t stop turning over that name in my head, Carrington. Because there is only one person I’ve ever come across in all my life called Carrington, and that’s Carrington Carruthers, the author of the very same adventure books that this whole affair reminded me of in the first place.
She pushes a cup to each of us across the table before she reaches for the box in my hands, laying her fingers on top of it almost fondly.
I am so on edge with anticipation, I hardly know what to say.
I just need to figure out what is going on inside her head, one way or another. If she can get us in.
“You think your husband buried this?” I ask her, breaking the silence between us, and she nods.
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” she replies. “He always did like his little adventures, Carrington. Put it in all of his books, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them.”
“I love his books,” I gush, before I can stop myself. “I read so many of them growing up.”
“You did? I would have thought you were a little too young, for when they had been their most popular.”
“My grandfather ran an antiques’ store,” I explain. “So I read a lot of older books. But his were always my favorite.”
“Mine too,” she agrees, with a slight laugh. Though she is doing her best not to let us see it, I can sense the weight of his loss hanging just out of my line of sight, as though she does not want to contend with the ache of it much longer.
“When he got ill, he was working on something,” she explains.
“And I never found out if he finished it. But he was writing away right up until he couldn’t hold a pen anymore, and I remember he had this little notebook, a leather-bound thing, and I teased him that it looked like something out of one of his stories. ”
I exchange a glance with Drew. The notebook, the one we found in the wardrobe.
“I had it for a while,” I explain. “But then, his grandson, he came by to?—”
“Grandson?” she replies, wrinkling her nose. “Oh, no, Carrington and I never had children. His books were his legacy for the world, that’s what he always told me.”
So that guy really was lying. Just spinning stories to get his hands on what he thought was owed to him. But how did he piece together that there was anything going on at all? It doesn’t make sense to me.
“Do you have the key for the box, Annie?” I ask her softly.
She rises to her feet, and lifts one of the small trinkets from the shelf beside her, a little vase that looks as though it is barely big enough for a single flower.
She upends it, and a small object falls into her palm. She holds it out to me.
“I found this in here after he died,” she explains. “And I never knew what it was for, but I didn’t want to get rid of it. I suppose I knew it would come in handy, eventually.”
It’s a key. My head spins with excitement, and, trembling, I bring it to the lock on the box. Drew reaches beneath the table and squeezes my leg, as though silently urging me onward, and I unlock the box and flip it open...
And find what looks to be an old book inside.
Handwritten. I lift it out carefully, praying that the pages do not disintegrate in my hands.
I gently leaf through the pages, and see that they are filled with handwritten notes, page numbers, chapter breaks.
On the very front, I squint down at the slightly-faded title, An Adventure for All Time, by Carrington Carruthers.
It’s not a title I recognize by him. And that’s when it hits me. I’m holding an unpublished manuscript. Holy shit! My heart skips a beat, and I look up at her, eyes wide.
“This is...?”
“What he must have been working on before he died,” she replies, moving to the side of the table so she can get a better look. She gently touches the spot where her husband’s name is written, as though she is remembering everything about him, feeling his presence once more without even knowing it.
“I knew he had another book in him, I just didn’t expect him to make it so hard to find,” she remarks, a slight smile on her face. Drew is still holding my leg beneath the table, and I feel as though it is the only thing keeping me pinned to earth.
“This must be worth a fortune,” I breathe. “An unpublished book by someone like him, people would give anything to get their hands on it.”
“And you found it,” she adds. “So, I suppose it’s yours.”
I look up at her, confused.
“What do you mean, this belongs to you.”
“Carrington obviously meant for this to be a mystery,” she remarks, with a shrug. “An adventure for someone else to go on. His stories, they always ended with someone finding treasure, didn’t they? I suppose this is yours. To do with as you please.”
A rush of emotion overwhelms me at the sound of those words. For more reasons than I can make sense of in the single moment of quiet that follows.
Excitement that we have finally found it, certainty now that I know what we are dealing with, the thrill of having a whole new book of Carruthers’ that I will be the first to read.
And a sadness, bittersweet, at the realization that my grandfather is not there to see it all.
He would have loved everything about this.
But before I can linger too long on any one of those emotions, the sound of an engine roars outside the house, and Drew is on his feet in an instant. He moves to the window, eyes narrowed.
“It’s him,” he growls. “The guy from the motel. The one pretending to be his grandson.”
Annie’s eyes darken at the sound of those words, and she rises to her feet.
“Let me deal with this,” she snarls. And, with that, she moves towards the door, and Drew and I rush behind her. She doesn’t know what she is dealing with, and I don’t want to see her hurt because this bastard can’t accept that we got here first.
Though, judging by the look on her face, he might be the one about to face off against something he doesn’t understand.