Page 2 of Cursed by Death

A lovely Queen Anne Victorian built in the year 1853. It stood four stories tall and proud. The brochure I clutched so tightly in my hand the paper crinkled informed me the mansion was a grand total of 7,000 SQ ft. All that room and it housed a total of 5 bedrooms, two full bathrooms and a half bath. Formal dining room and living room, with a family room on the second floor.

And an unfinished basement.

There was a turret facing West with a bird’s eye view of an elaborate rose garden. It was once my most favorite room in the whole house. I’d sit in the window seat gazing out at the clouds rolling by in the endless sky, day dreaming I was somewhere else, anywhere else. I’d do this for hours at a time, all the while living a different life inside my head than the one I was forced to live in the real world.

Fully restored, the brochure boasted. Contains three banks of original stained glass windows. Beautifully restored original oak hardwood floors. Two parlors, both complete with ornate fireplaces. Two claw-foot tubs – one that was even custom builtfor the original owner of the house. Original butler’s pantry with a copper sink. On and on the brochure went.

Harmond House, the brochure called it. Glossy pictures of rooms stuffed full of priceless antiques, original hardwood covered by well-loved and worn Persian rugs stared up at me from the glossy paper I held clutched in my hands.

For all of the mansion's charm and elegance – for all the brochures boasting - I was not impressed.

I was terrified to set foot inside the house.

“Excuse me, Miss.” A sharp female voice interrupted my thoughts. “Are you here for the Open House?”

Clearing my throat, not looking at the owner of the voice, I murmured a non-committed, “Yeah.”

This had been a very bad idea on my part.Verybad. But, masochist that I was, I had every intention of seeing this thing through. I needed some form of closure. I needed to let the past go and move on with my life. I needed to letthemgo.

“Well…” the sharp voice cut in, continuing to interrupt my thoughts. An intrusion, and an unwelcome one at that. “I saw you out the window, standing here on the sidewalk.” She paused to cough. The sound coming out sounded dainty and at odds with her tone. “You’ve been in that same spot, staring up at the house for a good twenty minutes now. It’s almost time for me to lock up the house for the day… so if you want to go inside and have a look around you need to do that now or come back tomorrow.”

At the thought of actually going inside, crossing the threshold, a cold sweat broke out across my skin. Panic threatened to suck me under, down into a dark bottomless pit.

What in the hell are you doing here, Ruby Jane?

Could I actually go through with this? I found that I could not.

Shaking my head from side to side I turned, still not having taken so much as a look in the female’s direction, I bolted.

My car was parked four blocks up the street. I didn’t stop running until it came into view. Once safely inside with the doors locked I finally let the tears out, to fall silently down my face.

I drove away from the curb with silent tears trekking down my face and shaking hands wrapped tightly around the steering wheel.

I’d be back tomorrow for the next Open House. I had to do this. For my sanity, I had to.

All my life I’d been alone save for the three years I’d spent at Harmond House. My time spent in hell was, oddly enough, the only time I’d never not felt completely alone.

My mother had died when I was just a girl, leaving me alone with my father. I barely remembered her. What I did remember was my father telling me I looked exactly like my mother, even as a small child. I had her eyes, he’d said. Her hair. Her smile. And he hated me for it. Losing the love of your life at the tender age of twenty-three, a woman you’d been with since you were sixteen and being left with the child you’d made together, a child who was a constant reminder of what you’d lost, turned out to be too much for the man to handle. They’d met in an abandoned house, a crack house, at some random party. Even then, at such a young age, my father had been making good money doing runs for a big time dealer. My mother had been fifteen at the time they’d met. A sweet, impressionable, naively beautiful girl who’d gotten herself mixed up with the wrong crowd. She’d ended up pregnant within six months of meeting him. This resulted in my mother being disowned by her family and she ended up moving in with my father in some tiny, run down, shitty apartmentin a horrible neighborhood. Over the years, they’d upgraded, trading a tiny shitty apartment for a sweet condo in a way better neighborhood. It was too bad for them that when they updated homes it had been because my father had moved up in the food chain, he’d gone from runner to enforcer. Ultimately, he’d been the reason she’d been gunned down leaving the building we’d lived in. Thankfully, I’d been in school at the time otherwise it’s highly likely I would have been filled with bullet holes right along with her.

My father could not hack being an enforcer for a big time drug dealer along with being a single parent and the sole reason the love of his life had been murdered.

So, he got rid of me. One day I came home from school to find the condo empty of everything, my father included. One of the neighbor ladies had called the authorities and that had been that. I ended up being taken in by a bitter, vile old lady who should have never been allowed to be around children, but for some ungodly reason, had been given several of them. Proof that money and status will get you many things, even if the things you want are sick and fucked up.

Her name had been Catherine Harmond and Harmond House had been in her family since it was built in the 1800’s.

When she went to prison, all of her “children” had been sent off to live in separate homes. As far as I knew, our secrets had been left behind, at Harmond House. No one had said a word. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or ashamed.

Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday I had been living in a group home for girls. Not a bad place, just a place to sleep at night, store my shit and was thankful because they fed us every day. An attorney had paid me a visit two weeks before I legally became an adult. He’d been my grandmother’s attorney, my mother’s mother. She’d been keeping tabs on me my wholelife. She had never wanted me but it seemed she’d always wanted to know where I was. Just in case, or whatever.

I thought this made her sound like an asshole, something I had no problem sharing with her attorney. Something I could tell by the look he’d given me that he had not appreciated my blunt words. Or maybe it had been because my grandmother had died four months prior and he’d been with her family, working for them since before she’d been born. Whatever the case, I hadn’t given a shit at the time.

I care now, though. Then again, things were a whole lot different now and Thomas Grine now belonged to me the same way he had my grandmother.

He'd given me a sealed envelope with a letter from a dead woman whom I had never met before. A copy of her will. And a file at least two inches thick with papers. The file was how I knew about my parents. How they met. Where they’d lived. How she’d died. What he did for a living and him being the reason she’d died. My grandmother had hired a private investigator and he’d been thorough in his job. The rest of the file was split between me and my father. My part showed pictures of me as I grew up, one for each year I was alive. My grandmother had kept tabs on me but had made sure to never interfere with my life, always staying out of sight and far enough away from me so as to make sure no one knew her PI had ever been there. The other part of the file was entirely about my father. My father, who was still alive and breathing, had moved from enforcer to King. A man my grandmother had hated with every bone in her body.

A horn blared, rudely jerking me out of my thoughts.

“Shit,” I swore under my breath as I hit the brakes and cranked the steering wheel to the right. Once back in my lane again, I pulled off to the side of the road and came to a stop.

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